Building the Deck

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Right off the back of our house is a retaining wall that was built by my father-in-law about 25 years ago. He build the wall with just field stone and concrete. He then back filled the area with just about anything that he could find. The wall was beginning to develop some minor cracks and we were afraid that these would eventually lead to having to replace this wall. We really did not want to because; one the expense, and two my wife liked the fact that "her daddy" had built the wall. So I designed a system to support the wall and at the same time act as the foundation to a backyard deck. I decide to build the entire deck out of garden timbers.

Not being an engineer by trade or education I may have over-engineered this system, or possibly under-engineered it. But my layman thinking tells me that this wall is NOT coming down anytime soon... at least not in my lifetime.

The following is two views of the under structure of the deck. This is the structure that serves as the bracing for the retaining wall and also as the beam structure for the decking.

I first built the top beams. These are four garden timbers glued and nailed together to form one 4"x6"x16' beam. I built all of these by placing two 8' timbers end to end and then placing the third timber in the middle and finally cutting the fourth timber in half placing a four foot section on each end. This meant that I only had to cut 1 in 4 of the timbers. After gluing (probably not needed) and nailing them together they formed a pretty heavy duty beam. 

You can also see that the posts that the top beams are resting on are also just two garden timbers jointed together. We then sunk these posts 2 1/2 feet in the ground in concrete. The posts are spaced on 4 foot centers.

The upright posts in the forefront of the picture are also joined garden timbers. These we sunk in concrete 4 foot in the ground. The height here is approximately 6 feet. We then built a brace back to hold the wall. We used four foot centers on just about everything we built on these deck. In this picture I have not finished all of the bracing. The bracing itself sits on concrete pads that are about 18' thick.

This is a top view of the deck. As you can see here we used five beam structures set on four foot centers giving us an overall width and length of 16'. The overall dimension of 16' x 16' also keeps the cutting of the top timbers to a minimum. We only had to cut (in half) 1 out of every 4 timbers.

This is a finish picture of the deck. It is really sturdy. The only draw back that we have found in using the garden timber as decking material is the fact that there is a groove between each of them. Leaves then collect in the grooves and is very hard to sweep out. We have found the only way to clean off the deck is for one of us to go ahead of the electric blower with a screwdriver and clean the grooves. Needless to say this is a drag!