The project we were dying to do before we even closed on the house was tear down the ugly deck.

Now you might we wondering why we would choose to tear down a perfectly good deck. It’s hard to see in video and pictures, but the deck was far from “perfectly good.” (For example, it was built on an angle to accommodate someone pulling into the garage bay, so in person it looked super awky.)

The Three Main Reasons for Tearing the Deck

More Driveway

Aside from not being the prettiest deck, it was also built on top of the driveway pad. We figured if we tore it down, we’d actually be able to turn around in our driveway. And since Main Street House is on a road that’s really busy at rush hour we decided it was something worth doing.

And now that the deck is down large cars can turn around in the driveway which eliminates the need to back out onto a busy road. But the boyfriend’s truck is still just a little too big to make turning around in the driveway worth it – it was doable but it was a 100 point turn! So now when he gets to the house, he sits out front and waits for the traffic to stop so he can back in and pull out forward when he leaves.

Uncovering the rest of the driveway pad also opened up the option to use that area as tenant parking or guest parking. (Since the deck tear down we’ve found an even better solution for tenant parking. More on that in a future post!)

Ugly and Not Built Right

Like I mentioned above the deck wasn’t built right and was also incredibly ugly. Besides being built on an angle, it also had a green plastic roof, the deck boards were cupping and the beams were’t tied together correctly!

There was also a ramp that had been built as the only entrance onto the deck which was covered in green AstroTurf. Lovely.

Surprise Problems

Another really good thing to come from tearing down the deck was this:

Once we started tearing down the deck we found two “good thing we caught these now” surprises – carpenter ants and groundhogs.

Once we started tearing up the deck boards we noticed a hole right at the house going under the deck. Removal of a few more boards revealed a second, even larger hole. Our immediate thought was groundhog, and we were right. (You should probably check out this post – it turned out we didn’t have just one ground hog problem, not two, not even three groundhog problems… but five groundhog problems!)

Aside from the groundhog problems, we also found ants. BIG. BLACK. CARPENTER ANTS. They were everywhere. They had already started to eat the wood from the inside out on a railing and two posts so it’s a very good thing we tore it down. Even if we didn’t tear down the deck this year, I don’t think we would have discovered carpenter ant problem early enough and would have wound up tearing down the deck anyway.

Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of those fat little guys but I do have another before and after picture below! If you enjoyed this post I’d greatly appreciate if you’d pin the picture below or share this post!  Have a happy day!