The deck.

Thanks to the efforts of Dana's dad (David) we now have a rather excellent deck in our courtyard! As David has pointed out a couple of times, it was actually probably only a two day job, but we took our time a bit more doing it.

Here's the courtyard before the deck:

You can see the rocks marking out where the footings for the deck will go. We hired a jack hammer to dig the holes out. We were originally going to hire a post hole digger to do the job, but the helpful gents at the hire shop said the combination of the rocks and the clay would probably render it useless. The jackhammer was awesome! Definitely the most fun power tool I've ever used. I don't want to dig holes in the garden without one ever again!

Jackhammer and resulting post holes:

Once the post holes were dug, it was a matter of combining timber, stirrups and concrete with about 600 screws.

Stage one - footings, bearers and ledgers in. This is the second day building the deck.

The next day we put the joists on and started getting the decking on. We ended up buying a drop saw to cut all the boards to size.

Dana proved that women can multitask - drilling and sawing at the same time!

The final day was devoted to getting all the decking on to the frame. Below you can see the deck at the start of the last day, lunch time and the completed deck at the end of the day!

Here's the before shot again for some contrast:

And finally, here's David, inspecting the work:

Now, all that's left to do is to wait until it's warm enough to use it!