Best way to build a deck next to your RV

Why not hinge the "gangplank"?

Looks good to me. At least you used four stringers under the treads.

Personally I would not / did not build ours 3' away... ours is snug up (if replacing trailer we will work on that at that time). Our 'upper deck' is roughly 8' x 30' with the last 9' covered in an arbor to hang my hammock swing on. :)

This deck was actually built 7' wide with that last 1' being an addition to the 7' and decking boards running the length of the deck. I figured building the support system this way I could remove that 1' area, pull the old trailer out, bring in a new trailer and make any adjustments needed in that 1'. Yeah, I've never built a house but this made sense to me at the time. :)

One thing I can see you are not taking into account is where will your awning supports come down on your deck? With the awning extended you really don't want to have to always be walking around the awning support poles; with placing you trailer 3' away from the deck you just lost 3' of your 8' wide potential shade from the awning bringing your max shaded area down to 5'. A typical table seating takes up about 6' depth with seating on opposite sides.

As far as height of your deck: Try to allow 1/2" per 2' awning pitch = 2" in 8' / the more awning pitch the better while retaining about a 6'6" head space from the floor of the deck to the bottom of the awning roller which means don't build your deck too high off the ground.



Shari

Well, I built ours rectangular, 7' by 20' with somewhat narrower steps and a roof about 1 inch above the trailer roof ht. Now, what I did different is I put flip up crank wheels (like on a small or boat trailer) on each leg of the porch so that if I wanted to move it I would just rotate them down and crank the deck up so the wheels were lower than the legs and then just pull the deck out away from the trailer and push it back in when done, lower the legs back down and flip the jacks back up out of the way. I used eight of them, as I said, one on each leg of the porch. With the ability to move the porch back to the trailer, if I'm not exact on trailer placement when I come back to my spot, it's no big deal. I got them at one of the cheapy tool places like Harbor Freight. By the way....I used the set up a couple of times and it worked great. When we moved from San Antonio and I sold the porch to somebody else in the park, they moved the porch with the wheels, until they hit the speed bumps on the roads, then they didn't work so great but for movement to and from the trailer they worked.