Introduction and Project Overview

In the past, I've built several pergolas. And from that, I learned that they're a complete waste of time. They don't provide any shade, they don't provide any shelter from the rain, and they're a huge amount of upkeep having to restain it every couple of years. Well, today we'll be building a low-maintenance pergola that you actually won't regret building. Let's get into it. This is my outdoor grill area. Well, technically it's just kind of where I keep my grill. And the plan here is to build an entire giant outdoor built-in grill station, an outdoor kitchen if you will. And the perfect solution for this empty area above is an outdoor pergola. Now, it's not going to be a traditional ginormous pergola that will take an entire weekend to sand and restain every couple of years. Instead, it's going to be narrow because we need it to be acting as an accent statement piece. And with that statement piece, we're going to have lighting, it's going to be narrow, it's going to be in the shadiest part of our backyard, and it's actually going to be an application that's worth building a pergola for. All right, this is some beefy material. This is Douglas fir, and it's not your average Douglas fir. This is Douglas fir that you got to go talk to a guy in a creepy alley for. Let me tell you why it's special. This is grade one resawn, so you have all these saw marks on there, no wane, premium lumber that you can't just walk into Home Depot and get. You have to go to special milling place to go pick these up, and that also comes with a steep sticker price. And for the boards that you see here, I paid $1,140, and that's just the lumber. That's not including any hardware or anything else. Let's take it apart, and the first thing we're going to do is be smart about this build, and we should stain before we