It’s going down…I’m yelling TIMBER

One of our first big demo projects was taking down the deck. Unfortunately, it seemed to have been another DIY project by the previous owner. The deck wasn’t up to code and parts of it were rotted and unstable – basically the opposite of safe. It had to go.

Trent and I decided we would do the demo on our own to save some money. Plus it looked like fun.

We started by buying “his and hers” sledgehammers from Home Depot because we are super romantic. There are many online videos describing how to demolish a deck, but come on, it seemed pretty simple. Similar to Trent’s tub thumping, we just figured the best idea would be to just smash it up.

As you can tell from this video clip, I was a huge help during the demolition – Trent’s encouraging cheers brought me enough adrenaline to knock down this one already-wobbly piece of wood. You may notice how strong I am.

After I swung my lady-hammer a couple times, I returned to my womanly duty of raking leaves . Trent did the rest of the deck because his ego is fragile and he requires constant validation of his manhood. Below is a picture of the top of the deck post-smash.

The hard hat was probably not necessary but removing some of the supports from under the deck could have caused the whole thing to come down on top of Trent. While hilarious, that would have been ugly. I don’t know that the hard hat would have offered much protection, but the peace of mind was worth it.

Don’t let the pictures fool you. I wasn’t completely useless during this process. I helped move pieces of wood to a stack in the driveway. Mule-work you say? Why yes then, I did mule-work.

Side note: if you are doing this at home, please wear gloves. I’m not sure if we were experiencing a normal amount of rusty nails holding this deck together,  but a rusty nail in the hand would be a miserable end to an otherwise glorious DIY day.We decided to haul off the wood on our own to save money so we tried to neatly stack it. Evidently you can’t just stack up pressure-treated wood and light it on fire any more. Thanks for nothing, Al Gore.

Here is the beginning of our stack – guess which side I started stacking on. If you guess the side that is thrown into a big pile with no known organization, you would be correct.

Presley was obviously a huge help to us during this process. 

And drum roll…… we are finally finished with the demo! Now we can walk out of our kitchen to an untimely demise. Perfect.