It is difficult to know where to start when describing this project!
Planned from scratch, with no clearly defined boundaries that could not be moved by a metre or so if required, the brief was to construct a raised timber deck leading out from the rear of the house.
The deck was a rectangular lozenge shape, with two corners at the terminal end of the project (the other end being fixed against the house), plus another two in the corners of the lozenge.
Somehow, the builder managed to set the four corner vertical posts away from the corners……..which meant that the balustrade and hand rails did not meet at the corners, but some way from the corner posts.
Quite apart from the pretty awful workmanship, the result of creating a double corner – one with vertical corner posts, the other formed by some cobbled together hand rails, badly screwed together. As you can imagine, the safety barrier/balustrade was very weak indeed.
The spindles were all over the place, with spacings between 100mm and 200mm (ideally these should be no wider than a tennis ball to prevent children from getting stuck in the gaps) and secured only with a single screw driven from below with no fixed spacers in place.
Decking is a straightforward, yet complicated construction project, with myriad ‘rules and regulations’ that involve careful understanding and planning, with steps, heights, strengths, stresses all being taken into consideration before and during construction. Simply buying a pile of decking materials and starting the build without technical drawings is fraught with problems………