Born in a Barn: Trigger Deck Technology

Our deck represents a large proportion of the total floor area of our shedhouse.

It will have a nice shelter over the top, and we plan to spend quite a bit of time on the deck because – really, what is the point of having a bush shack, if you are always in the shack and never in the bush?

And on this deck there will be drinks and love and fights, and singing and dancing, and smiles and smiles and smiles....

Andbecause it will be such a feature in our lives, we wanted to make it a feature in our house.

One of the things with the farm is that it has been reclaimed from forest. Which really means all the bloody trees are relentlessly marching down the hill, and reclaiming their stake.

One of the biggest pains in the neck is a tree called Hickory or Black Wattle.

It is a fast growing emergent species – which means it is all we can see from the deck – well that and blackberries. And tobacco bush.

Black Wattle does however make beautiful cut timber for furniture and decks.

What better material to use! Especially since we can threaten the rest of the bloody stuff with a similar fate if it keeps coming down the hill!

So we’ve sourced this material from the ‘giraffe shed’ which is all well and good. Until you realise that it is a ‘mixed pack’ which leads to different challenges.

When you buy timber it comes in packs that are the same size and length. When you source material from the giraffe shed it does not. Your shopping experience is also a little different, moving old old lick blocks, and blue tongue lizards to get to your materials.

Then sorting them using the very mild super power that is years and years of stacking timber (your keen eye) in the back of the white dog landcruiser over to site.

Then sort and stack, restack and sort and try and build the puzzle together.

This one here, that one there

Err, that one over there

At first we talked about mixing up the widths of timber so it looked deliberate rather than opportunistic – but then I had a idea of using an optical illusion to increase the size of the deck.

You know how when you draw things, the things that are closer are bigger and the things that are further away are smaller.... well that is what we have done.

The lengths were mixed too but for a deck that is not too bad. So long as your joins are not all along the same bearer/joist thingy, you are all good.

Cut em down to size..

Instead of using nails, we have also chose to use screws (bugled headed batten screws that are counter sunk) because of Australian hardwoods tendency to ‘spit’ out their fixings.

The FB did a brilliant job of laying the first pieces – and so after that it was me, two drills – one with a driving bit and one with a drill/countersinker (which was totally worth the $29 investment) and just getting em laid!

The first one!

We did run out of the fancy screws – which seem to have some kind of Teflon stuff on them to make it easier to screw into pine – and so I did a mercy dash to Mitre 10 in Boonah on the public holiday.

If you really try – you can make it door to door in 32 mins. But I wouldn’t’ recommend it.

Anyway – here are some more pictures of the beautiful deck.