Do-it-yourself deck building

Providing you with detailed
"How-To" tutorials
for your deck building project

Estimating

In this second tutorial, you will learn in a few hours of reading what it took me more than twenty five years to learn in the School of Hard Knocks. I cannot stress enough the value of free advice and a wealth of information you can find at your local Building Codes Enforcement office. The format is the same as the deck building section. The first section gives you a list of materials used in building a house. This list is ordered literally from the ground up. Figuring out how a house is built is the job of an architect. What I do, and what I hope to teach others, is how to figure out the quantities necessary to build a house. The architect draws the pictures and makes sure the structure meets all the necessary code requirements. Our job is to figure out how many pieces of each type of material are required to make the pretty pictures come to life.

Sections two thru seven give you definitions, shortcuts and formulas. Our fictitious house is laid out in seven parts; from the ground up. The eighth section is pretty much a compilation of leftover shortcuts and formulas because I don’t know what else to do with them. I’ll try to keep this jumble to a minimum and put stuff in its proper place. So without any further to-do, DECKSTER is proud to present ……………… (ta-da)….……….….the next tutorial ! ! !

TABLE of CONTENTS

(1) General Order of Things

(2) Foundation

(3) Flooring

(4) Walls

(5) Roof

(6) Exterior Trim

(7) Interior Trim

(8) Hints, Shortcuts and Formulae

The General Order of Things

The following list of materials covers just about everything necessary to build a house. You are not expected to do the actual building. You should do a little homework so as to understand what all goes into the building of a house.

The right thing to do is to hire a contractor to build or renovate your house. His function is to keep things moving along in a timely fashion. That is important and why he charges what he does. He is the ambassador from the Trades people to you, the check writer. His job is to know everybody else’s job. Try not to talk to a Trades person. At best, they’ll ignore you and they may just walk off your job. They are very independent and work because they actually like what they do and take great pride in it. Their strange and foreign language is known only to those within their tribe. This does not include you. These are the real people with weapons of mass destruction. They are called hammers, screwdrivers and nail guns.

The contractor’s fee might be somewhere around 25% to 30% of the overall cost of your project. The actual cost will be whatever you can negotiate. I’m only offering a suggestion. When you add quantities to the following work list, you will have a shopping list. This shopping list can then be combined with the contents of a cost estimating book. This will provide you with the cost of labor for the many and varied aspects of construction.

Submit your shopping list to two or three lumber yards for pricing. Be clear and up front; you want their best price because all they get is one shot at your business. You, as an end user, must also understand that the trade off for their best pricing is 100% of your business. You may not pick and choose the best pricing from each of the bidders (also called cherry-picking). If you attempt to do this thing, you will be told that your list must be repriced accordingly. The prices will go up. All of this will provide you with approximate costs. Your job pricing may not be guaranteed for the run of your job unless this is negotiated into your price quote. Lumber is a commodity item traded on the Chicago Exchange and thus fluctuates daily. All of this will give you the ammunition to talk to your contractor intelligently. Absolutely everything is negotiable.

1.	REBAR	48.	HIP RAFTER
2.	POLYETHYLENE	49.	VALLEY RAFTER
3.	REMESH	50.	RIDGE BEAM
4.	FOUNDATION VENTS	51.	for other than prefabricated roofs...
5.	DRAIN TILE	52.	COLLAR TIE
6.	SUMP PUMP	53.	TIE BACKS
7.	SUMP PIT & LID	54.	ROOF SHEATHING
8.	EXPANSION JOINT	55.	PLYCLIPS
9.	WINDOW WELL	56.	RIDGE VENT
10.	BLOCK FILL	57.	ROOF FELT
11.	DUROWALL	58.	FLASHING

The cost of this marvelously inspirational as well as motivational tutorial is just $30.00. This will give you access to all my wisdom involving all 91 building material items.

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