Deck Progress

Here is the reason I haven’t been posting stuff here, answering email, or available to any of my friends of late. The past few weekends have been spent measuring, sawing, pulling old rusty nails, demolition, and replacement. I have swapped EVERY beam and plank seen in this photo, with the exception on the ones along the railing and those that remain painted green at the bottom of the photo.

I had to replace the beams underneath first – one at a time. Christopher did a lot of the work by pre-painting the beams and planks. (The unpainted beams are some emergency replacements from our snow-storm breakage from a few years ago.) The planks were only done on three sides, leaving the tops raw wood. The paint chosen was an oil-based alkyd, so he put on a coat of primer then finished them with a coat or two of the color. The past two days I’ve been laying in planks on the top. Basically removing the old ones, and laying in new ones. Chris & I screwed them all down yesterday.

Oddly enough I am not a very mathematical person, and really more of a visual thinker. At the start of the project I counted up the beams but then when it came time for the planks I just looked at it and literally guessed how many I’d need. My spatial estimation powers were confirmed when I completed the project just one plank short. I think I would have been dead on but I ruined one plank with the saw in the process. Yesterday we came to a point where the drill batteries were dead and we still had half the planks to screw in… so we all loaded up the pickup with all the scrap. I had to saw up the longer planks to fit in the truck’s bed, and in the end it was stacked up to the height of the cab. Chris & I took all the scrap to the dump and spent the better part of 45 minutes unloading them one by one. 3.38 TONS of scrap according to the scale. We swung by the hardware store and I purchased that one last plank, and a cheap Hitachi corded drill to finish the job.

This morning I was up @ 5 am and used up the rest of our cache of crack filler to uh… fill in all the cracks and over-driven screw holes. Chris is sanding the surface now and I raised up the tarp in hopes of keeping it dry if the weather goes to hell. My hope is to finish before I have to leave for Montana and the GTTSR. I doubt I’ll make it all the way, but we’ll see. Next summer we’ll have to replace a few more beams and the railings of course. Sigh.. the joys of home ownership!