Front deck - out

Our ~17 year old cedar deck came to the end of it's life last year. We had some serious rot patches and I was only willing to walk across it as long I was over one of the bearing sleepers. Given that we'd never treated it, and the only reason we could afford cedar in the first place was to buy seconds, 17 ish years did pretty well. The other point was that the paving of the drive and the area in front of the deck (and the removal of the bamboo) had exposed just how sad it was looking.
However, having replaced the back deck the previous year, we decided we wanted something  bombproof that we wouldn't have to worry about replacing in our lifetimes.

First things first - what were we going to replace it with? Dave had been browsing for some time and had identified a synthetic alternative to wooden planks made of a composite material and impressed with a fake wood grain - Neotimber. Using that would mean us laying planks perpendicular to the existing ones, so he also identified some synthetic 2x4 (essentially) for noggins (suggested by the Neotimber sales rep, sourced from Build4less) which would need to be attached to the existing sleepers with joist hangers. Given both materials were composite and the sleepers weren't going anywhere we thought that might cover the bombproof angle.
As for the balustrade, I started fantasizing about steel and glass, then actually found a steel balustrade company that was reasonably priced, from Tradebalustrade. Although the glass panels looked awesome, because it's at the front of the house, we decided that we'd probably be adding some bamboo cane screening again, as we had on the old deck, so it was a bit of a waste of money. We went for steel wire version instead, as we could easily attach the bamboo screening to the wires if we went that route (the customer service at Tradebalustrade was also excellent, by the way). The decking and noggins cost around £1600, and the balustrades the same again, so once we'd thrown screws, joist hangers, rivets etc into the mix we reckon on a budget of around £4000. We had everything delivered pretty much at the start of the 2020 lockdown in March and April.
We'd decommissioned and dismantled the gas barbecue and put it in the back garden to let us survey the damage properly. We started unscrewing (mostly) the planks and laying them on the deck, with the original intention of having a large bonfire. However, we also embarked on a big garden tidy up at the same time. We'd had to partially remove the teepee in the garden last year when putting the new grass in, and had accumulated quite a fair spoil heap in the far back corner of the garden. As I was working from home full time now, I was getting fed up looking at it every day out of my "office" window, so eventually settled on a 6 yard skip... we then upgraded that to an 8 yard skip when some of the furniture we thought we were donating to a local charity was turned down because the mattresses got damp overnight when we left them outside for collection.
So skip came, we filled it with all the metal stuff, including the dismanted gas barbecue, first, so it magically emptied itself overnight. Then the contents of the back garden (including teepee), the dead planking from the deck, a fair proportion of the unwanted toys from what was formerly the girls' room and finally the balustrade (minus the spindles, as we retained those for firewood) ended up in it. I managed to sneak a few surplus kitchen bits and pieces in as well. Best skip ever. That was essentially our cancelled 2-week holiday in the COVID-hit July of 2020.