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Steve's Outpost
A cedar pergola over a patio at night, strung with warm bulb lights, seen from underneath

Section 09

Home DIY

Same instinct as the garage, applied to the house and the yard. Real projects, my own photographs, and the parts of each job I would do differently.

This section exists because a treehouse was sitting in a hub about vehicles and it clearly did not belong there. What it belongs to is this: the things I have built around a house rather than in a garage. It is the same instinct — buy the honest materials, do the work myself, write down what I got wrong — pointed at a backyard instead of a driveway. There are two projects here to start with and more coming. One is a freestanding elevated playhouse the kids call the treehouse, built on its own posts with no tree involved, which turns out to be the better way to do it. The other is a pergola at a house we no longer live in, built during COVID in the space where an outdoor cooking area I had built earlier used to stand — because sometimes building something means unbuilding something else first. Both pages are photographs I took while the work was happening, captions that describe only what is actually in the frame, and no dimensions, costs or timelines I did not write down at the time. Where a job needs a specific class of hardware I say which class and why; where the manufacturer publishes real guidance I send you to it rather than paraphrasing it.

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Straight to it

The builds

The builds

Two so far, both photographed while the work was happening. More coming.

Everything in this section

2 Home DIY pages

Before you buy

Outdoor structures are decided at the footing, not the finish

Everything visible about a deck, a pergola or a playhouse is downstream of what the posts are standing in. Get the layout square and the posts plumb on the first day and every cut afterwards inherits that. Get it wrong and you spend the rest of the project fighting an error you made in the first two hours, in every single joint.

There are two legitimate approaches and it is worth choosing rather than defaulting. A post buried in the ground with concrete poured around it is simple, common and strong, and the failure mode is the bottom of the post sitting in water. A standoff base holds the post an inch clear of the concrete so water drains away instead of soaking into end grain — better for longevity, more work to install, and it needs anchors set accurately in wet concrete.

Whichever you pick, brace everything before the pour and then leave it alone. A post that moves while the concrete goes off is a post that is wrong permanently, and no amount of care later recovers it.

Connectors are engineered parts; deck screws are not

The difference between a structure and a stack of lumber is the hardware holding it together, and the good hardware has published numbers behind it. Structural screws, joist hangers, post bases and rafter ties all carry allowable load values from the manufacturer. A long deck screw and a toe-nailed joint carry whatever you hope they carry.

That distinction matters most where the consequence is highest: anything overhead, anything elevated, and anything a child climbs on. Buy the rated connector for those joints and use the fasteners the manufacturer specifies — a joist hanger's rating assumes every nail hole is filled with the right nail, and half the holes filled is not half the strength, it is an unrated connection.

One detail catches almost everybody once. Modern pressure-treatment chemistry is corrosive to plain zinc, so the coating on the connector has to be matched to the lumber it touches. Galvanized is the minimum and heavier coatings exist for exactly this reason. A connector that fits perfectly and then corrodes in three years is an avoidable and very common mistake.

Prep and finish are the parts that decide how it ages

Fresh pressure-treated lumber is wet, and wet wood will not hold a finish. This is the single most common reason a beautifully built structure looks terrible after one season: the stain went on before the wood was ready and it never bonded. Check the finish manufacturer's guidance on dry time and be patient with it.

When it is ready, penetrating oil-based stains are far more forgiving on a structure with a hundred edges and corners than film-forming finishes are. They soak in rather than sitting on top, which means they wear rather than peel — and a finish that wears is one you refresh with a wash and a coat, while a finish that peels is one you strip.

The cheap items are the ones that punch above their weight. A nine-dollar post level decides whether the whole build is square. A twelve-dollar roll of anti-slip tape is the difference between wet treated pine and a safe tread. Neither is exciting and both matter more than the tool you were planning to buy.

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