Homestead Cabin Deck Secrets: The Ultimate Affordable, Low Profile Railing Technique

For everyone looking to build their dream home or dream cabin on your own homestead, it's not just about the cabin, it's about the outdoor living space, the outdoor life, the outdoor environment. Now I know you may not have a beautiful view of the lake, but you probably have a beautiful view of the stream, a field, or even the trees. And actually, this is what Jason and I are doing today is actually building the actual railing system for our outdoor living. And we use this to get you what I call, Jay, a negative edge look, just like a pool that you can actually see. So we're going to show you how cheap, easy, and fun it actually is to build railings, which is one of the most daunting tasks about building a deck. And we did almost 200 feet of it today. And before the end of this video, we're going to show you exactly what it looks like, all stained, all ready to go. Solid, my friends, solid. So stick with us. We'll show you how. Honestly, guys, I actually stewed over this project for probably over a year. I probably should have already had this done, but originally, I mean, and I had 200 linear feet of railing that needed to be built around this. And I was actually going to have a whole rod iron, something falling on the thing, Jay. Don't worry about that. Don't worry about that. I was just going to have some rod iron railing made. I was going to say just some rod iron railing. I wanted to do something custom, something cool that's going to enhance my house. And honestly, the price tag of $15,000 is probably why I actually did not move forward with that. But in actuality, I've had thousands of feet of railing made from rod iron companies. And one thing that I didn't like is that you didn't get like this. It's almost like a picture window of your deck. It's a railing. It is super sturdy. It is super strong. But you're able to actually view your whole entire deck. It's seriously to me, it's like a window into your property. So I mean, the simplest thing and I don't know why I didn't come up with this sooner. I've never built the railing like this. And I'm going to tell you right now, after the first few panels I put up, I was so happy. I was so impressed of how this actually looked that sometimes I don't consider to myself of how hard work we have to do to make what we want and how we want it to look. But these were so extremely simple and so extremely cheap to make. To be honest, I'm going to be 100 percent honest and I still have one piece left. All of the 200 feet cost me three hundred and forty dollars in materials and the screws that I needed to put this together. So as far as a price wise, it is definitely an A plus. And as far as the view, how it looks, I'm giving it an A plus as well. Now, for me, these were really simple to make. Guys, we actually make our own. Everything on this deck that you see is white oak that we've actually cut off our sawmill from our property, which is some of the longest lasting wood that you can have for an outdoor environment, outdoor deck railings and everything here. So what we did is actually I just made extra decking. This is actually decking material that we actually use to frame in our our fencing here. And and honestly, for us being timber framers, our timber frame posts were already in place. So if there's a slight discrepancy or slight anything, you are making individual panels that are actually going to fit what you already have built. So, I mean, very simply, we've actually just created we just measured out everything we had squared off the lumber that was there. So we were able to screw it in place. And on the long run, all we did was add in an extra six by six white oak support system here. So we use the same exact material that we put down for our deck that we use for our railing. So it's not like we had to make a whole bunch of different products and the retrofit to get this fence to retrofit just the way that we did here is simple and easy, even with whatever tools that you actually have here. We'll show you how we do it and I'll show you a couple of different ways that it can be done. After that, it's just a one, two, three operation and it installs pretty darn quickly. It was kind of fun, to be honest. It was fun. I wish we had more to do. And I've been I've been putting this project off for so long. And now it's almost done day and I'm wondering what we're going to have to do next week. We actually have to move into the carriage house. We do. Looks beautiful. So for making your panels, your individual panels, which are actually all going to be different, they should be different sizes. I know mine, everyone I measured right down to the quarter of an inch. So everyone was a different size. So the only thing that you have to do is that we're sizing everything. Our lengths of our pieces say this is going to be it. Those are going to be the full length of whatever your measurement is going to be. And then we just have a pile of side panels because they're all exactly the same because we're trying to use the entire bit of wire that we have to make the height of the fence that we want. So the only thing that we need to do to build yourself a frame to get the wire to hold in there is to actually mortise out a channel inside of your, your frame, let's say. So before you do all your pieces, you put everything together. Now there's a multitude, a multitude of ways that actually this can be done. We use ours on our shaper with a shaper bit. This gives us more speed and consistency for every one of the pieces to be made. You could take yourself a hand router with a mortising bit and use yourself a 3H mortising bit. You could put your guides onto your router and you could router by hand each one of these pieces. You could also do it onto a table saw, which is buried way over there. But if you wanted to use your table saw, you could either use a dado blade that's going to cut you wider, or you can actually make more than one pass. I don't know how much linear feet of fencing you need to make, but if you've got 200 feet of it, doing something that takes three or four passes to get exactly what you need, it's going to lose a little bit in time. So for our consistency here and the speed of what we have, we basically just take any one of our pieces. So for us, we're just going to actually start the machine. I'm going to put my power feed on just to keep us going in the same speed. Help me along. That's kind of why having this machine right here with the proper size bit that I want in one pass, I'm able to make the channel that I need pretty quickly. But as I said, if you don't have this, you can use a table saw. You can use a hand router. I bet you you could use a skill saw if you put your guide gauge on there. So at this point, after we've actually made each one of our pieces, we really just bring them back to the table. You can see right here where this might be a little rough, and anything you're going to cut is going to get rough. So all we do before we actually go to assemble, we just sand off the edges. I have Jay stain. Anything that's got that raw wood inside, you're going to want to at least get protected. So you see we have your raw wood here. We're actually all stained, sealed, ready to go. So that's a pretty simple way to do it. Now the only thing on these panels, and what I did, show them here, Jay. I know where you're going with this. For our bottom leg, because we're going to be outside in the weather, you can see every six inches, I drilled what they call weep holes. So that you do not have water standing inside your wood, which is going to cause it to rot, going to cause it to fail much more quickly. So for us, the weep holes is actually key. You just got to make sure that when you build your panel, that you put your weep holes and they're on the bottom and not on the top like we've done in the past. No comment. But you already did. I've got no comment. Now, this is a small piece of what we have, what we're actually using here. I don't know. I'm going to pick up a big piece, Jay. This isn't even really the big piece. You go to, I bought this a tractor supply. They were $30 a sheet. They're 16 feet long. I still have a trailer load of them up there. This don't take me wrong for your million dollar house. This is pig fencing. And anywhere you go, that's exactly what it's going to be. And that's exactly what it's going to be called. And this is what farmers and pig farmers are actually people that want to build panels for their livestock. This is what you use. It is strong. It is durable quarter inch wire. So as you can see, the beautiful part about the pig fencing, it's 34 inches. You don't have to do any cuts. By the time I'm finished with my panels, what do we have there, Jay? Let's take a look. Now, this is going to, let's see, I'm using a pretty thick top, which I believe that you shouldn't go less than the three inches. There's nothing else to look. I'm 41 inches tall. It passes any one of the codes that you're going to need for an outdoor railing. It has the spacing that you're going to need to pass any code, any county to make this actually work. So perfect. Perfect. It's a good bar height. People are going to be wanting to lean on it. Exactly. It is a good bar height. So for actually buying a product that you don't even have to, the only thing I have to do is cut the sizes on this. So for $30 a sheet for a 16 foot piece, I don't know. You're getting down to pretty cheap for what you actually need, my friend. I like that. I do like that. At first I had the same problem you did. This is pig fencing. Do I want to put pig fencing? When I actually went there, measured it and how perfect it's actually going to work out and what I saw, I bought them right away. I'm glad you did. Perfect. Perfect. So here we even want to go. This is as simple as it could possibly get. Maybe it could get simpler. If someone else built it for you, it probably could get a little simpler. And if you have somebody helping you, it's even more simple. It is. Hey, most of the time. Did you see how it went in? I'm locking the bottom pieces that I want right here. I'm just kicking them into place. That's it. That's what we need to do. Your panels are almost building themselves, Jason. Yeah, it was close, but I'll tell you what though, it's been a lot of fun. This is like we talked about. This is, and it's satisfying. Let me get some screws together. I'll show you how to do the final patient on it. And, uh, we'll install some here. What you're doing is fitting your top piece in, getting your wire into the grooves that you actually want. And it's real simple. And we're just using, these are deck screws. I wish they were tan, but honestly, you're not going to see them. They're right here. Uh, I ran to the store and they didn't have any tan ones. And we needed these last couple to finish. So I hear you just finishing now for me, I pre-drilled the holes in here, which is going to help prevent any sort of cracking into your oak. I don't pre-drill down into the grain length here, but you probably could just get your wire fit back in. I'm in. We're perfectly snug there, Jay. Nice job on that cut. Thank you. I'm making my frames like these are picture frames. Well, I got a picture from here, Jay. The picture is the lake that you see through it. Yep. Look at that. There we go. Your panel is actually made. That's it. So once you get all your dozen panels that we have going on in here, as we did, we came around as we're installing before the railing went up. All that we're actually doing is we're going to pilot drill holes like we did on the top pieces there that can keep from preventing. We put spacer blocks underneath ours. Ours are two inches. Okay. Most people, and maybe if you're in a super high snow area and most, most normally you're going to have a four inch gap underneath of your railings there. Me, I've got two dogs that don't stop playing ball constantly. So I decided to actually put mine at two inches because one, we don't have a snow problem. I'm not going to have a problem with the water there. I didn't want the tennis ball to come flying off the deck and me have 600 tennis balls in my backyard because I didn't feel like running down and getting them. I didn't even think of that. My whole reason about this fence was how do I keep the tennis balls from falling off the deck? Not only for the look, but the best solution for my pets, my wife, and my wellbeing of running up and down stairs consistently. I don't think 600 is an exaggeration either. I've seen the farm. It is not. I can't leave my property without running over 20 tennis balls. I don't know why we can't play with one, but yeah, we had 600 of them. So that is the reason that I did mine. If you guys wanted a taller railing and you didn't want to cut the wire, you can always raise what you have here. If you live in an area where you have a crazy code and they want 56 inches, I mean, I know that that's not true. I was going to say, I don't know about that one. You can raise that. I do believe some parts of California might be 42. What did I say? I'm 41. You know how those inspectors are. If you don't got your hand out for some cash, this one inch could cost me thousands of dollars. Well, then you go with a four inch rail. That's all I do. I would jack this up to the top. I knew we were doing three inch tops. My inspectors have become my buddies, so I feel good about it. Simple, easy install, simple, easy to put together, cheap, and you can get this product everywhere. I don't care where you live. Tractor Supply had hundreds of the sheets just laying there when I got there. Beautiful. Let's put these last panels in, see how that goes. OK, let's get it done. So now we're actually at the point we have all our panels in set and it's time to actually build your top rail. And while we did, we actually had we only used three logs of my white oak. Now you're going to get some bad pieces and things like that. Everything that we cut for this particular project is this is three inch wide by three inch thick, let's say, by nine inches wide. And that's actually the railing. So normally what I do is I'm actually putting up my longest pieces first, going through my pile to make sure that I have what I need. Right now, I'm down to the point where I only need a four foot and a five foot piece, which I can easily cut out of any of the material that's questionable on a long piece that you have going on. So what we're going to actually do is we're going to size these units and then what we have and what I did and you can use any different profile you want. This is just a half inch over round bit just to get rid of this rough edge, smooth edge, because everybody is going to be rubbing their hands on your railing. I don't care. They might not touch a metal one. I've had a hard time keeping my hands off the railing I made and not just while I was making it. I actually enjoyed sitting there. But the only trick to actually this particular thing is when you get your cut, when you cut the sizes that you need, you're making your cuts and you know that that's my railing. You need to flip over and you need to route on the table. This is essential that you do this in two different steps. You do your routing on the underneath side or before you install it because you're never going to get the router in there afterwards. So I get it and you don't really have any problem. There's no seams for you to check out here. But what you're going to do is you're going to route your bottom pieces and then we're going to actually come on. Let's come on over and show some a little bit of the rail that we do have up already. Let's take a look. Here we go. Now this is how I made the seams here for mine and maybe I didn't 100% check if this is 100% square. But if you were actually going to do a 45 cut, which you can do, it's going to be a longer cut. It's going to be something longer that you might have to do a couple measurements and a couple of test fittings here. The way that we notched this out, it was perfectly easy for what we had to do. Now in each one of these holes and originally I got I didn't have a hole anymore. What we did here and originally what we did is we took a forester bit a three quarter inch forester bit and I actually bored down a little bit and originally we were going to actually take timber framing pegs and actually glue them in place as caps to hide the screw that we got. And at the last second at the last portion of the night before we decided that we're not going to put in the wooden peg, I had Jay mix us up some epoxy and we put some black in there so it almost makes it look like you have black walnut pegs holding in there. It was simple. It was easy. You're going to have no issue with your weather whereas you might even though you put your little plug cap in you're going to glue it in you still have two pieces of wood going on here. So I actually think that the way we sealed this was much better. I like it. But as we're installing these units here and we're actually we're going into eight by eight posts so I have a lot of meat for everything for my system to sit on. All we're doing is we're driving eight inch timber pegs into there. So inside each one of these holes we have a timber peg holding this together. All of our joints here are glued. You guys could biscuit join that together as well if you're really let's say Jay even said it when he's finishing and these are furniture grade railings on this project. I mean with it being white oak you're not going to have any issues with the weather. You're not going to have any issues with the bugs. But every one of the joints around here and we're able to work it make it perfectly smooth. So we've already routed the bottom because that's what we did to make sure as you can see you're never going to get your router in here to get this handle to work correctly. But what we do is after after everything is installed and we actually have our timber pegs in the glue is dry we've already epoxied the hole so that we don't actually have to do this step twice is now we're going to just sand the top of the whole unit so that everything is baby soft smooth. Now this is hard for me to bring up on camera how baby soft smooth feels but I think you get the idea. Now one of the reasons that you're actually not routering the top of your plate well I said you have to do this in two processes. Once you've got everything sanded and leveled exactly where you want it to be all you're going to do is run your router around your top edge. So you can see right here if you would have actually run the router completely through here on the table before you join this together you're not going to get this smooth finish right here. This is where this is imperative important for it to be. So after everything is flat everything is done it's just a quick run around and a little bit of the sand and you have a beautiful finish. I mean I can't actually stress how strong this really actually is. Now thank god our wood the wood that we cut was two-year-old white oak log so they're already pre-dried. I'm hoping for not too much shrinkage and hopefully the way that we glued this together biscuit jointed this together at least our steam will take it and we'll just lose maybe a little bit on here. But it being exterior wood it doesn't need to be kiln dried because you're going to kiln dry it and then it's actually going to balance itself back out to nature. Wherever you live the moisture content in the air this is a piece of wood so before you actually stain just because you stain it the staining is going to help keep the water off it give you a beautiful color but it is not going to stop actually how much moisture that you have in your particular area. So in each place I guarantee if we're in Utah or Arizona this might dry a little bit too hard because the sun is one of the worst I guess the worst problems that wood can have. I know everybody thinks about rain sun UV rays actually would would crack this. I mean that's why in Arizona when we work we don't do much outdoor woodwork like this either everything is the man-made product or stucco. Stucco is what they like to use you're never going to find wood siding on a house unless you're way up in the mountains and quite honestly where I lived way up in the mountains the UV rays were so strong up there it just destroyed wood quickly. So this just is a beefy beefy railing for you. I mean I don't even know how many drinks you I was afraid that our foundation by the time we there isn't very many places where I've had to put a top railing up and I had to use my crane to lift that up because I was wondering how Jason and I by ourselves are going to get that 500 feet put 500 pound beam on the upper floor. Thank God I got a crane because we loaded us up on top and we did that. It was heavy. So here we're at the point right now we're going to show you too what it looks like is that we're actually ready to put the stain on this thing and we're going to call this finished. So simple and easy all we're doing is sizing our railings here our railing model to fit simple. How do you like that little saw squatch? I love the saw squatch. I love that little guy. And sometimes good here why don't we show if we're already talking you can see so when you wood is drying or anything and you might have checks or cracks that's why I'm just cutting off the six inches here. You watch how clean that piece will be. It's a perfect piece Jay. I got my shin out of the way on that one Dan. That's nice. I was wondering why you're standing right underneath the log I'm about ready to cut. Imperative though. Don't use a small square on these because this is rough cut lumber is a possibility. This is pretty straight here you can see right here so if I actually had a small speed square on there it's going to give me a different angle so I can actually see what's going on here with my big squares. I always check both sides which we're running pretty flat. That's how you do that. That looks pretty good. Now this is a straight piece so we could get lucky and actually we can router both sides of this because there's no internal or external corner it's just one straight really between two posts. It really doesn't get any easier than this Jay. I like this one although I like when they connect. I'm not gonna lie. I like when they connect. I like when the square works out. This one for me on the table just becomes quick. Now because this is going between two posts now I told you not to cut both sides of it but with something like this at the barest minimum you're going to have to do the edge and the tips because you're not going to be able to get your machines in to do that. For me I know it's straight so we can actually go all the way around and call it good. White oak railing Jay. There you go. Looks beautiful. A little bit of sanding a little bit of thing. Now I'm picking out which is going to be my bottom or top side. I like this side better. Not only for the grain pattern that's here with the curls up here. This is going to help with some sun exposure. Putting it in this direction as opposed because these are longer grains over here. It's going to not want to cup as bad in this direction as it would. This is going to want to cup like this very slightly with a screw down. It's going to stay in place and this is dry but if it was wet this will help you out. So we've got the handrails cut and we're actually just fitting in making sure that our seams and everything here are going to fit and just bolt it down in place together. That's in there strong Jay. That was not coming out. It's not coming out. So I want to fasten this outside one first. So by fitting it on the top if you actually have your posts which are hard in timber framing not to twist not to turn. You're able to set your booms and make sure that your railing looks exactly the way that you want it to look. It might be a visual thing but we're trying to make this square perfectly square. Now for what I've been doing here is we've actually just been gluing the outside. So for my master, I guess my master woodworkers, you could just as easily drill in dowels and dowel the pieces together. You could even use a biscuit joiner. I'm just going to go with the glue with most of my guys. So we'll see how long that is last but I feel good about it Jay. I feel good about it too. This stuff sets up. It does set up. You said biscuits now I'm hungry. I love biscuits. We're in the south bud. I love biscuits. So I'm just putting an ample amount. This stuff dries quick too. This woodworking glue is what we build all our cabinets with. We're going to seal it from the outside. So the glue is going to act it's like a gasket in there and then we're going to actually seal the top of it. But that's my belief anyway Jay. I like that. It is kind of like a gasket. It really does help. It does. Not that this is really going anywhere but no not once those timber screws get into place. And I'm just putting a shim in here. I have a slight metal shim to make that fit here. I'm going to show you. Came off my sawmill. That's right. It's perfect though. It's going to be able to balance out my rail. Put it where I need to be. Now for me I always put my angle. You got to find my drill Jay. There you go. We're using our angle. It's going to pull that join in. You see how that You don't even have a lot of sanding to do Jay. I like that. I know that you do. That's it. I don't mind sanding but too much. Simple and easy for a top rail. It's so beefy it doesn't even need any support. It's actually supporting the whole thing and I think it's tying my frame together. Look at that. Boom. A little sand. Finish routing and it's going to get a coat of stain just like rest of it. Some epoxy plugs. Epoxy plugs. Yep. Those look good though. So the final step after you have all of the railings installed. You have all of your screens in place. Everything is screwed in where it needs to be. What we're doing is we're coming back and we're cutting four by four white oak blocks. And we're using this to actually come in as support underneath every one of let's say we'll call this the bottom portion of the frame. Now we actually just got this one in here. I'm going to put one more in the corners underneath each one of the actual seams that we have here. So there's going to be no way even if somebody here it's big. If somebody wanted to step on that you're not going to actually break. You're not going to move anything as part of this railing which is going to make it sturdy. I mean you've got a sawmill. You got property. Cut a four by four. Stick it under there. Make sure it's tight. I hammered mine in pretty good Jay. Good. Well just think if you had kids you definitely need those because they're going to stand on that rail. They're gonna. I mean actually most adults probably do. Yeah I mean that's right. I'm 25 feet above the ground. So you don't want to have an octopus. I can't. We could tie it to a truck. That ain't coming off. It's coming off. So that's it. You get to staining. You're all finished. You're supported. You're screwed. And I think you had fun doing it. It's got to be better than nailing on. It would have taken. I figured out the math the other day. It would have been 680 slats. If you wanted to build a wood normal railing. Every four inches put your slat 680 times. You'd be cutting a piece. How much of that wood is actually going to be bad not used for a thing. Or if you had to buy them. They're four dollars a piece. There's where you start extending your paycheck to your view. Plus losing your view. Plus there's no wind effect. And this wire is absolutely nothing. Nothing that needs to be done. I at first was going to paint it black. I like it the way it is. That's the way it's going to stay. So it's galvanized. So you actually have a zero maintenance. And I don't want to say zero maintenance on the entire thing. Do you know how many times you've been to somebody's house. They got a broken slat. A cracked slat. From putting the screws in. And quite honestly this one is just 10 times better Jay. And it looks great. And it disappears. This could take your trailer into a million dollar home view. That's what I gotta say. You got a trailer. And you're like I don't really care about what the property value is. It's easier. And I think you just upgraded your trailer my friend. Hey I need one of these around my trailer. We will. We'll go with that staircase we're putting on there Jay. That's right. So Jay and I were really not even going to make a video about this fencing project that we had going on here. And I don't know why I put it off for so long. Because actually I had fun building this. I've been dreading actually what I'm going to do. And I really only came up with this idea about a week or so ago. I didn't even let Jay know until we got started. But look after the stain. Look how beautiful. I love the black epoxy pegs. Yep. That is going to be perfect. So guys this is an easy way to build a railing. A full view railing with low maintenance. So I hope that this helped you out. Maybe gave you some ideas of what you can do in your place. Use the wood from your forest. A couple of bucks at the store for some pig fencing Jay. I love the pig fencing. I do. You watch the amount of pig fencing that gets sold after this video. There's going to be railings all over the place just like that. Looks good Dan. Thanks everyone.