At one point in the past, @mrsbozz and I had a pretty nice space in our backyard. A couple years after moving into our house, we took it upon ourselves to tear out the existing deck, then we hired a local contractor to install a nice new composite deck. Over time, we purchased a few items to make the space just a bit more cozy. The pergola was the main purchase and then I added the string lights sometime after the fact.
While the pergola wasn't perfect, we really enjoyed the fact that you could pull the cloth across the length of it to give a bit more shade. It served us well for several years, and then this happened...
2020 and the time leading up to it was a pretty crumby year all around. In late 2019 we had our basement flood, then in early 2020 Covid hit as well as a major leg injury that had me visiting the wound clinic for close to six months. Finally, in early June we had this branch from our maple tree land on the deck.
Needless to say, the pergola was toast. A couple of months and $2000 later, we also had the tree removed to hopefully avoid something like this happening again in the future. Thankfully, we were able to get some money from insurance, and I was able to get the parts to fix the deck railing myself, but we didn't do anything about replacing the pergola right away.
I had some ideas, but never the funds, and then finally after a couple of years we finally decided to make something happen a couple of weeks ago.
For a while now, @mrsbozz has been having issues with the sun, it's almost like an allergic reaction to it. She has actually timed herself and she can't spend more than 15 minutes in the sun and she will burn or break out in hives. She blames it on her Swedish ancestry, but who really knows, our doctor doesn't seem to have much of an explanation either.
Rather than her resigning herself to stay indoors all year, we decided to take advantage of one of the deals that online retailer Wayfair was having during their annual "WayDays" sale.
We decided to go with a hard top gazebo, and after it sat in our garage for a couple of weeks, we took it upon ourselves to tackle the task of constructing it over the 4th of July holiday weekend.
The gazebo came in a total of four boxes with each box weighing about 80 to 100 pounds a piece. The first task was pulling everything out of the boxes and making sure that all the parts were there and nothing had been damaged during shipping or delivery. It all looked pretty decent, so we got busy putting some of the preliminary stuff together.
I had reached out to my friend @a4xjeeper asking him how much it might cost his crew to install the gazebo for us. He ended up giving me a quote of somewhere between $1000 and $2000 USD to have them put it up. I was a bit shocked, but I understood where he was coming from. My concern was that if I tried to do it myself, it might take forever versus just paying someone to have it done in a day or two.
As he explained to me though, there are a huge variety of structures like this by dozens of manufacturers. Some of them go together relatively easy, and others go together in the most difficult way possible. Without knowing which way this one would go, he couldn't guarantee anything.
I totally get that and I respect it, but since I had only paid $1000 for the gazebo (on sale), I wasn't going to drop twice that to have it installed.
Instead, I reached out to another friend who has two physically fit adult sons and I told him I might need him to be on standby to help out with the installation. He was more than willing to lend a hand if he could.
With the legs of the gazebo all assembled, we decided to take it out to the deck and get an idea of where it was going to set. We had initially looked at a 10x10 foot gazebo, but I decided to be a little extra and go with the 11x13 foot gazebo. I was hoping that my desire to go bigger wouldn't bite me in the butt and end up with a gazebo that didn't fit on our deck.
Luckily it didn't, and before we knew it we had the beginnings of a gazebo taking shape on our deck. It actually went together fairly easy and where I thought I might need two or three people to hold up the support beams, @mrsbozz and I were able to do it ourselves along with the ladder I brought home from work to go with the ladder we already had.
We worked a total of three or four hours on Thursday morning before we called it good. We were able to get the main structure up as well as most of the support framework for the roof. We decided it would be best to just work on it in the mornings before the sun got too hot in the sky and the humidity was unbearable.
We still had a bit of work ahead of us, but the part I was most worried about was taken care of and it had went relatively smoothly. Plus, it fit on the deck which is always a plus.
Be sure to check back tomorrow when I show you the rest of the process for putting up the gazebo and I share some photos of the finished product. It's pretty impressive!
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