Building a deck is a great way to bring your entertaining outdoors, allowing you to enjoy everything that mother nature has to offer to you. One of the easiest types of home improvement additions that you can make is to install a deck, because most of the work can easily be done by yourself. The first step to building a solid deck in your yard space is to build a solid concrete deck foundation or a wood deck foundation, depending on what you want your final results to look like. Here is a look at building a concrete deck foundation as opposed to a purely wood deck foundation.

Materials you will need

In order to build a patio foundation or a deck foundation you are going to need 4 inch lag bolts, 4x4 treated deck posts, wooden stakes, Sakrete and enough 6' x 2' pieces of lumber to go between all of the porch posts that you create.

Preparing your deck foundation site

First and foremost, you should check with your local building department in order to determine whether any permits will be needed for your building job. Different areas have unique laws for building additions and it is vital that you follow these completely. Unless you are actually pouring a permanent concrete foundation, you should not need a permit however.

No you should identify where you want to build the deck, staking out your perimeter accordingly. Most decks are built out of wood over a foundation made of wood with concrete block footings. You can buy these footings in a pre-cast form from your local home improvement store.

Now you should level the ground below your foundation space using a square foot shovel, ensuring that the footing is all on level ground. You can use a board with a straight edge to level the ground off, checking with your hand level to be certain.

Finishing your deck foundation site

Now you should place 6' x 2' boards between two of the porch posts near the post bottom where the top of the ground and the post meet. Fit another 6' x 2' board level with the deck top. Now attach your deck to the house using 4" lag bolts and washers, drilling a small pilot hole into the home where the lag bolts should be started. You can use an electrical impact wrench or a ratchet wrench to attach the deck. Now you should place pre-cast concrete footings at intervals of four feet around the entire perimeter of the deck.

If you are building a larger deck size, then you should place them at intervals of four feet inside and out, but if you are building a smaller deck you can use less post footings. No you should place each footing in a small hole beneath each post, digging out a level space and filling the area around each concrete footing using sand once it has been placed in the hole. Attach more porch posts at this point to make sure that the foundation posts are stable, and repeat this process all the ay around the perimeter of your wood porch foundation.

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