We built this detached garage in a style that matches the client’s main house, including custom cedar beams, a clear cedar cladding on the articulated garage door, custom attic vents, traditional 4-part stucco on the gable end, and cedar siding with mitered corners.
Kylemont Doors in Marysville custom built the person-door. We finished it with Daly’s SeaFin Teak Oil, then hung the door in a custom jamb and installed a Schlage L-Series stainless steel mortised lock set.
This side-entrance room was three-feet square and connected the kitchen, the garage, the driveway door, and the basement stairs. In fact, this was the entry and exit that the family used most. It was the busiest room in the house.
The floor and stairs were covered in industrial carpet meant to catch tracked in water and dirt and prevent slipping. It was squeaky, soiled, uninviting, and it had that old-house smell.
We removed the stairs and rebuilt them using structural fir carriages, oak treads, and white painted pine risers. We rebuilt the foyer landing floor with 2X10 Douglas fir joists on 12-inch centers, topped with ¾-inch CDX plywood and a ¾-inch mortar base. Then we added a double layer of Schluter Ditra uncoupling and waterproofing membrane.
We custom cut our own finished floor tiles from larger pieces of split and gauged slate. This let us achieve an attractive pattern that fit our space and gave us plenty of grout lines and roughness for foot traction, even when wet. After removing steel bars from the driveway door, repairing two split door jambs and replacing a third, we re-bored the doors for new locksets, added weatherproof thresholds, a new light fixture and wall switches and fresh paint. The result was safety, cleanliness, durability, and attractiveness.
Like most builders in the Pacific Northwest, we get called on to build and repair wooden decks. My best advice on repairing decks usually is “Don’t! That deck is probably in worse shape than you think.”
To make your deck last, keep it free of dirt and debris, help it dry, repel carpenter ants and other nesting critters, and tend to minor damages immediately.
Decks collapse more often than you might think, and when they do people are often seriously injured. (Deck Collapse, by Robson Forensics.) It often happens with a group of people on the deck when they all move to the railing to see something. The deck pulls away from the house and collapses. It may have been under designed to begin with, or it was never attached well enough, or the fasteners have weakened from contact with treated lumber, or the wood itself has decayed due to trapped moisture or prolonged contact with dirt or leaves.
Railings are susceptible to the leverage of people leaning against them. The International Residential Code (IRC) requires deck guardrails to be able to withstand a lateral force of 200 pounds. Personally, I would not trust my safety to something able to hold back only 200 pounds when it was new. (The Simpson Strong-Tie Deck Center offers excellent material on designing and building safer decks.)