- Start in one corner of the sub-frame and position the first board across the inner joists. You want the deck board in the opposite direction to the inner joists, ensuring that it’s flush with the frame. Position any end-to-end joins between the deck boards halfway across an inner joist so you can screw both boards into the joist for stability. Make sure you keep a gap of between 5-8mm to allow for expansion of the wood.
- Begin to screw your deck boards to the joists. You’ll need to secure the deck board to every joist is covers along your deck frame. Use two screws for every joist. Mark where you’re going to add your screws, ensuring that they are at least 15mm from the end of the board and 20mm from the outside edges. Drill pilot holes for the screws, being careful to only drill through the deck board and not the joist. Then screw the decking screws into the holes.
- Continue to screw in the deck boards, ensuring you leave the correct expansion gap. You can stagger the deck board joins across the deck for more strength.
- Sand down any cut ends if you need to before applying decking preserver to protect the timber from rotting.
Dunbeath
Dunbeath is a town in south-east Caithness, Scotland on the A9 road. It was the birth place of Neil M. Gunn (1891-1973), writer of The Silver Darlings, Highland River and so on, a lot of whose stories are embeded in Dunbeath as well as its Strath. Dunbeath has an extremely abundant historical landscape, the website of many Iron Age brochs and an early middle ages reclusive site (see Alex Morrison's historical survey, "Dunbeath: A Cultural Landscape".) Of Dunbeath's landscape, Gunn wrote: "These small straths, like the Strath of Dunbeath, have this intimate elegance. In boyhood we get to know every square lawn of it. We encompass it literally as well as our memories hold it. Birches, hazel trees for nutting, swimming pools with trout and also a periodically noticeable salmon, river-flats with the wind on the bracken and disappearing rabbit scuts, a riches of wild flower as well as tiny bird life, the soaring hawk, the unforeseen roe, the old graveyard, ideas of the people who once lived far inland in straths and hollows, the past as well as the present kept in a moment of day-dream." ('My Little Bit Of Britain', 1941.). There is a community museum/landscape interpretation centre at the old village school.
