It’s been fascinating watching Garrick build the structure of our roof top deck. It actually floats on top of the membrane roof thanks to the innovative Nurajacks from Nuralite which suspend the deck above the bitumen surface. A jack gets fixed every 600mm to the joists, then its base is screwed up or down to level the deck off, saving Garrick a lot of painstaking time fiddling around with timber to create the same flush finish.

Well part of them are here. The steel stringer arrived today and was installed by the Stylecraft Stairways team. They are two big bits of steel so it took some man power to get them off the truck and into the house.

It’s flippin awesome to the stairs in place and for the first time, we can actually walk up to where our roof top deck will be. After the walls have been plaster boarded and painted, the treads and glass will be fitted and our sculptural work of art will be complete. Yay!

 

Check out our stairs! How good do they look!!??

I popped down to Wellington to check them out yesterday while they were assembled in the Stylecraft Stairways factory. They always do this to ensure they’re perfect, before sending them off to be coated and delivered to site. 

Unfortunately Kylie couldn’t make it, but I was able to FaceTime her as I walked up and down them. Honestly we couldn’t be happier. The Stylecraft team have done an amazing job. They are stunning and we can’t wait for them to be in our house.

Which isn’t too far away. The treads will get coated, the steel stringer will be painted and the glass balustrade made, then they’ll get shipped up to Auckland next week.

 

Stylecraft make all kinds of stairs for projects right across New Zealand. While I was there I couldn’t help but take a bunch of photos in the factory as the guys went about their craft. 

I don’t know about you, but we love a good deck. We spent ages looking at our options for the actual decking and while we love the look of hardwoods, we realised pretty quickly that we’d be paying a premium for a timber that would silver off and bleed in no time at all.  Rendering it to a homogenous look shared with even cheaper pine options and it would be considerably shabby compared to the house.

We’d heard about composite decking, but were a tad skeptical about ‘fake’ timber until we found innovative kiwi company Outdure and their brand new range of 50% recycled plastic/50% recycled timber decking called ResortDeck. It looks seriously natural, comes in five diverse colours that are full of texture and no two boards are the same.

But the biggest reason we went for it in the end was the fact it’s fade resistant, so will look the same as it does today, in 10 year time. Meaning we can spend our time enjoying our decks rather than maintaining them. Plus it is slip resistant and won’t splinter. Genius I reckon. The ResortDeck is a new generation composite, only released this year and is superior to its predecessors, alleviating a lot of the prior known issues around movement/expansion/contraction.

Our builder Garrick laid the deck behind our master bedroom on Saturday and thanks to the innovative quick-clip system (no screwing off needed) he’d finished in about 4 hours, which is so, so much faster than using timber where each board needs to be pre-drilled and screwed off every 400mm.

We’re so stoked with how it’s come up. It looks incredibly natural, so much so that it was mistaken as a hardwood deck in the valuation report we had to get done for the bank!

I’ve taken this week off work to try and knock off a heap of painting. I’ve been arriving before dawn and captured the house in this beautiful pink light this morning. Hey good looking!