Privacy screen for roof terrace

This is what I’ve been busy with for the past few weeks. Building a deck and privacy screen for an apartment roof terrace in Tribeca, Manhattan. Very swanky place. The building is a single 4 floor residential apartment and a restaurant on the ground floor. The total renovation cost for the apartment was about $1.6 million. I’m just building the deck and screen and handling the punchlist and building department sign offs and that sort of stuff. But the deck was, for me, the big job.

No pictures of the deck, unfortunately, since we just finished the screen and the deck was covered in garbage bags after cleaning up.

The screen covers a mechanical bulkhead with a boiler inside and AC equipment on the roof. It’s not so much for privacy as it is to hide the bulkhead.

I started the screen by reinforcing the bulkhead parapet, then laying out the section locations and using treated 2bys for blocking. Then I set the 2 steel screens (called eco-mesh, which I think is for growing ivy or something) and then bolted steel angles to the parapet and lower walls to receive the wood panels and reinforce the eco-mesh screens. Then I made the upper sections, then the lower and lastly the gates.

I did not design this, but I did throw away the dimensioned drawings and did what I wanted, keeping within the design intent. Dimensions on the plan were from Pluto. LOL. A lot of parts.

The screen stands almost 13’ tall. The frames for the wood sections are made of this wonderful, nearly perfectly clear cedar 2×10s and the slats from knotty, box store style cedar. Between the deck and the screen, I went through over 30 lbs of screws. I used ceramic coated deck screws for the screen. All the fasteners are hidden. For the deck I used stainless steel trim screws. The decking is some kind of amazing bamboo and resin composite. It is nothing at all like the garbage composites sold in the box stores. It’s beautiful, cuts like a dream and is extremely stiff. All the materials were on site already. All I had to do was get fasteners and rough materials.

There is a lot of that beautiful clear cedar left over. A bench with an integrated planter is also planned, but we decided to hold off and see if the purchaser makes it a condition of the sale. So it will stay on site until I find out, then it will come home to papa! It’s over 250 bf. I think the bench will take half of that, if it gets built. The architect may insist that it gets built because part of its function is to protect the skylight behind from drunk people falling into it.

I hope so! There is not much better than getting paid to have fun! And that is certainly what this job was. So much so that I was reprimanded for somewhat neglecting my other paperwork related duties at this job. :-)