Search the Community

As I near completion of the outdoor kitchen, I thought I would start this thread and post some pics. We decided to do this last winter and started speaking to a few contractors about what we wanted. I sketched out the design in sketchup to show them exactly what I wanted. We needed to renovate the back porch and part of the concrete deck. I also wanted to add a new porch that would house the outdoor kitchen and provide a comfortable place to cook year round. It was April before we settled on a contractor and he couldn't start until June 11th. He anticipated 2 months of work. There goes the summer. Before pictures don't get much better than this. Ok, so it wasn't always like this. This is after the spring monsoon when I had all of the concrete demolition. I quickly realized I needed to think about drainage because most of this would be concrete and the rest would be mud under the new deck. $4k later, I had a new French drain system. The original plan was to leave the roof on the back porch and demo everything else. Once the contractor got into it, he thought it would be better to take it all out and start from scratch. it didn't affect our cost at all, win for us. The deck also came down and the new one started to go up. I could see the light at the end of the tunnel at this point and even felt like cooking again (although it could be a bit hazardous getting across the deck joists).