Backyard Renovation Updates: Demolition Progress, Next Steps & Bad News about our Trees

Last week we learned that aluminum costs way more than we thought. We got a price quote for the entire rebuild of our second story deck which includes demo of the current deck and stairs, custom built, water sealed storage under the stairs, a full rebuild of the stairs and second story deck as well as having all of the upright posts wrapped in cedar. The aluminum roof quote which includes demo of the current aluminum roof and installation of new aluminum roof as well as screening in the second story deck was nearly 2 times the cost of the deck quote and about 4 times more than we were expecting. Before we got the quote for the aluminum, we were thinking that we were very close to having the money saved up to cover the whole project. Now, we are certain that we don’t have enough cash at the moment, but we are plugging on. We’re going to take each item one step at a time and if this means that we have dirt as the ground covering for our bottom floor for a few months, while we save up, then so be it. Maybe we will let Piper experience the fun of mud-pies once it starts getting rainy around here.

While we did have a bit of sticker shock from the aluminum roofing quote, we decided to keep the momentum going and continue to move forward with the renovation. Right now we’re simultaneously working on finalizing the drafts and getting architect’s approval on our rebuild while we are DIY demoing the bottom deck.

Anyone need some old wood? We are not quite halfway through the bottom story demo and this is our output. Thinking that perhaps one dumpster won’t be enough to hold everything! 

Speaking of our DIY deck demo, here’s what we’ve done on that so far:

It’s definitely coming along. We still need to demo the main area under roof and then we have to tackle the shed back there.

Here’s another shot of the deck we have left to demo:

(Featuring our newest addition to the indoor house plants! I found this guy at Lowes this weekend and brought him home as our first medium-sized floor plant/tree. Hoping he enjoys our family room as much as we do.)

In other news, The Tree Lady came out this weekend to talk to us about our oak trees. She had amazing insight and I learned a ton in just the 15 minutes she was here. I highly recommend her if you’re looking to trim/remove/save your trees and are located in Winter Haven, FL or surrounding areas! The main reason we brought her out was to talk to her about trimming up the tree in the picture above (not our newest little guy – that big live oak to the left). One of the large branches that’s currently stretching out above our current roof needs to be removed completely in order to make way for our new roof plans. We plan to push the current roof up to the same level as the second story roof so that from the second story you can look down into the main patio area. So we needed to make sure that we could remove the branch without killing the whole tree – because my dream was to leave the tree there and work our patio space/concrete floors/aluminum roof around it. The good news is we can cut the branch with a 60-ish% chance of survival for the tree.

The bad news is, the only  ground cover we can put back down this close to the tree is more deck. The concrete we want would be ruined within a few years because the roots of the live oak would try to surface and push up through the concrete. So after serious thought and discussions about potentially changing our whole deck plans to accommodate this tree, we decided with heavy hearts that we will remove the whole tree instead.

Fun fact: when you look at a tree’s canopy (the large green part at the top), the root system of that tree will be 2.5 times bigger than the canopy.

So that means that this tree right here is already growing big surface-level roots dangerously close to our house’s foundation and while it may not be an issue right now, we can surely expect it to be an issue in 10 or so years. So even though 10 years sounds like a lifetime away, we determined it would be in the long-term best interest of the house/deck/future homeowners, to remove the tree.

As we plug along on our demo, the first official contracted step of the backyard renovation is taking off today! Our aluminum roofing guy is coming out to demo the roof. After he takes the roof down, he will determine how much (if any) of the aluminum panels can be reused and we are hoping that once the demo is finished, we will learn that the majority of pieces can be reused for our new roof which would save us a considerable amount on the roofing quote. More on that next week.