Tom Boy Sawyer

Friday, October 24th, 2008

Half Deck

We have a running joke that since we have built only half the deck on the studio, we are not playing with a full deck…

Here’s our very first floor joist with a soffit tennon inserted into the soffit mortise on the main beam.

Since it is our own structure, one of the benefits (or maybe it is a disadvantage) is we make changes and modifications as we go. Here’s some stairwell deck framing planning we did on the sill while looking at the structure.

On the exterior walls, the floor joists have full dovetails through the external beam. The dovetails rest on the sill plate. The joists are hammered into the main beam (see first picture above) and once they are all in place, the two external beams “slide” over the dovetails. In the four corners of the structure we have a lap joint (which will have the corner post tennons down through them. There are two end beams and they lap each other at one of the full dovetails (see the beam on the right has one end beam over it and is waiting for the other beam to lap there. It all locks together without any hardware.

Here’s what the deck looks like from inside. The ash has beautiful figure to it and is incredibly stiff and sturdy. The joists are thickness planed down to 3.5″ x 5.5″.

Here’s the deck from up above. We’ll be filling in around the foundation later today.

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