Hi,

I've been reading through this board for weeks trying to decide what to do about our proposed deck. First of all, thanks for so many great ideas and suggestions. This is going to seem like a lot of background for a couple of small questions, but here it goes:

When we bought the house 8 years ago, it had a sliding door on the main floor and a walk-out basement in the back, which means that there's a 9 foot drop out the door. With little kids, we just locked the door and pushed a sofa in front of it while we saved up for a deck.

The backyard slopes and is a bowl shape (it's all sand back there, and years ago, it was used to dig out all the fill when they built the road. We're in SE Michigan, so the slope in our backyard is really the only thing that looks like a hill for 50 miles in any direction). A deck would offer us access to the side yard and garden, which is flat), as well as stairs to get down to the big bowl-area, which is partially wooded, has a firepit area, and is nice for privacy.

There's no problem with drainage in the backyard, and there's an above ground pool about 24 feet from the house (the only flat spot in the yard). The plan is to have a two level deck: the upper is 14x21 and stairs lead down to a smaller 10x10 near the pool. The upper will be about 9 ft above ground and the lower will only be about 43 inches off the ground. The upper level extends about 6 feet into the side yard and has a pergola for some shade (house does not directly face the road and is at an angle facing NW, so the backyard deck gets sun all day long until well into evening).

It's a beautiful deck design, and is actually bigger than I had planned, but structurally we had to work around a mishmash of windows, doors, retaining wall, etc., so this works best and gives us a huge outdoor space.

My husband has some time off, and our brother in law, a contractor, has cleared some time to work with us to finally put up the deck. He's never used ipe, but he didn't want to use cedar and was pushing composites. We about died when we saw the price estimate. However, the 1x6 ipe is similar in price to the composite, so he's willing to work with us, and is pretty interested in the stuff. He's known as a perfectionist, so I'm sure after a lot of cussing and complaining, it will look nice.

Two big questions:

1. With the 1x6 boards, we were planning to just screw them down because of the cupping issues with those boards, but now I'm hearing that might not be an issue 9 feet off the ground -- so what to do? There's a small patio currently underneath where the deck will be, and I'm concerned about what it will look like under there, as well as trying to get a nice look on the deck surface itself. What's best when you're going to see both the bop and underside of the deck?

2. If we do just screw them down, should we just use stainless steel, or the brown-coated screws? How do those really look between stainings, and does the deck take a stain as well the second time around?

Any advice is welcome -- It will take them a while to put up all the structural pieces, but I'd like to get the ipe ordered very soon (I've been talkint with East Teak, and it looks like a good deal there). I'm just in charge of ordering the "fancy wood" and fasteners, and then I think I'm getting out of town for a while when they start wrestling with it all in this heat and humidity.

Thanks, --Chris