I love that you actually posted a before and some after pictures. I have been looking at this section of Houzz this morning for the first time and very few posts keep true to the heading, Before and After. Nice job for first time deck building. It's a great improvement. Are you going to enclose the underside at all?

Excellent work!

That's an ambitious job to tackle! The craftsmanship looks clean and precise!

Well done!

Nice job for doing your first deck, but it's not code compliant.

As Tony M mentioned you cannot have a post sandwiched between 2 pieces of 2x... The beam should rest on top of it and should have post to beam anchors.

The spacing of lower rail along the stairway railing should also have a smaller reveal where a stair tread meets the riser, so a 6" sphere will not pass.

Here is a deck cross section to give you an idea.

most local county /cities you have to get a permit to build a deck, I had to do that when the deck was built. Nice deck but like others stated you need to improve it for safety and code reasons

We took ours off brought in dirt to raise the elevation, and put down a paver patio. No maintenance, no permit needed. 20 years later we will love it and have not missed the every other year staining AT ALL.

@arcy_gw, you had to stain every other year? Then quit using garbage stain. I used sherwin williams and my deck still looks pretty good after 5 years. Its beginning to peal a little and thats only because i used transparent stain. A solid stain would last at least 10 years. A couple of times the deck looked like it needed to be restained but it was just dirty. A quick light pressure wash and it looks like new.