Up and about

Gee, wake up early on a Saturday and can't find a blog anywhere. Well, I cast the net rather poorly, but I'm still going to take it as a sign that I need to add to the pool rather than take from the pool.

Wow - that was a bit short. Hopefully I can finish what I intended before it propagates. I had promised to provide more details about my "raised patio" so here goes.

Anyway, I picked up my building permit yesterday. The municipality graciously cashed my $150.00 fee and will let me build my deck. Or "raised patio" as I have been referring to it. Just so there is some context, the municipality of Thames Centre (where I live - aka Dorchester) uses a rate of $0.42/square foot, with a minimum of $150 (see here for details). As a contrast, the City of London, ON, CA has a minimum charge of $90 (see the section "Submitting your Application"). Most people wouldn't bother with a permit to build a deck, and in some ways that is less hassle. Problem is, if something goes wrong later the issue will get escalated. With the permit you get the satisfaction of paying the municipality money to come and watch you work.

In this case, I need to arrange for 4 inspections. I've spoken with the building inspector and he had some key areas to make sure things were done a certain way. In particular, making sure that structure is properly tied to the foundation wall was the biggest one, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Instead of wood deck, we decided to create a precast concrete and masonry structure. By "we" I meant me, my wife (who was not keen on wood) and my dad, the mason. He's been working with creating his own precast pieces, redoing the front patio of their cottage with balusters and capped with long precast cap to replace the railings. The result was excellent and led to the idea for this structure.

The lower part of the structure will be masonry walls sitting on a poured concrete foundation. The walls will be split-faced concrete blocks and form the perimeter of the deck. The deck itself will be precast slabs that are about 3 feet long, 18" wide. The railing will be the same baluster design my dad used at his cottage. So with all that concrete we needed to get a permit in case someone wondered what we were doing back there. I don't think anyone would question a simple wood deck - so many people assemble them on successive weekends the question of "permit" never really comes up. This is different so it is best to be conservative.

Anyway, I'll have some more details in upcoming days, possibly with pictures. I need to record all the digging I'm going to have to do over the next little while...