Well, the steel is sort of my fault. I wanted close to zero maintenance, minimal vertical supports, and I wanted it substantially over-engineered. Note I say “engineered”, as opposed to “by guess and by golly”. Originally it was going to be aluminum, but to achieve the minimum level of over-engineering I wanted would have required another pair of supports and another truss. The company doing the roof proposed a steel design built by a local steel engineer at the same price, so I went with that. The structure is strong enough now that we could have made the roof out of concrete and it would still have been fine.

We can’t really hang anything on it yet as the staining needs to be done, but we’ll probably have a few flower baskets next year. Funny you mention silk screens- at one point when I was lazing on the deck I had this thought of getting some oriental folding panel screens 😉

Sorry about your back… but doing a pull up? You are crazy 😉