chuck.goolsbee.org

My prediction of the snow being gone by Sunday was way off… by a week. There is still some lingering here and there, but it is mostly gone now.

I’m fixing the deck this weekend. If you recall it cracked under the load of snowfall from the big storm, but obviously it was rotting and would have failed eventually. This is not surprising really as I have been replacing beams (but not large 4x12s like this one!) for the past few winters on an as-needed basis. The house was built in 1980, and then painted sometime later. The deck beams have all been painted on their sides and bottoms, but not their tops, so the relentless winter rains have taken their toll as water was able to soak in from above, but not escape the wood. I have been varnishing the replacements with Varathane to prevent this from happening again.

So yesterday I went to a rental place and got some tall jackstands to hold up the deck while I demo’ed the rotten beam. I had to call around to find some of these high-lift jacks, and finally located some at a tool rental place in Stanwood. Driving over there I was treated to the larger impact this storm had on the region. Trees were bent, broken, and down all over the place. People were out, picking up piles of tree branches on their property. One area, where the Pioneer Highway and Norman Road come together has a tree farm. They grow some sort of fast-growing deciduous tree there specifically for making paper pulp. It looked like a miniature Tunguska Event or Mt. St. Helens eruption… half of the farmed trees were laid over flat, all pointing in basically the same direction as if some giant hand had pushed them over like dominoes.

I rented the pole jacks and brought them home, and raised the deck enough to start the demolition without fear of it collapsing. The big, rotten 4×12 didn’t come down as easy as I expected it to, as it was attached to some overhead beams with some old rusty nails. I was able to get a hacksaw blade through all but one of them, and then I made sure everyone was away. I pulled out the supporting 4x4s (which showed sign of rot at their base) and it still hung there. I poked and pulled it from afar with a metal fence post and eventually it came down with a crash.

I purchased some replacement 4x4s at Arlington Hardware (the 4×12 beam I had bought earlier in the week from Oso Lumber and had been covering it with Varathane out in the barn) and prepped the area for the installation of the beam. I put the 4x4s in place, and created a stand for the beam with a ladder, some lumber, and the bottle jack from the pickup truck. This would allow us to hold the beam in place while we maneuvered it to the proper location.

Above: Christopher is fascinated by a carpenter’s level while I survey the preparations. The beam is on the ground to the left of Chris, and the ladder & jack on the right. the 4×4 support at the far end has been righted, while the near one will be lifted and tapped into place once the beam is up.

Above: On the left you can see the beam lifted into place. Once that was done a lot of hammering and pushing around was done to get the second 4×4 support into place. On the right Christopher shows off the tools of the trade: the level and the heavy lead knockoff hammer I borrowed from the boot of the Jaguar for use in motivating the beams to all align properly.

All this work took a few hours to do. Given the weight of the 4×12 beam I had Sue, Chris and I go through some practice runs of putting the beam in place and jacking it up – with a lighter 2×4 of the same length. Sue passed the time between our needing her out picking up smaller tree branches. She and Nick went out and made an attempt at the big piles of branches, but quickly realized that they are much too big to pick up by hand, at least not without cutting them up first. She called a landscaper we know and he’s coming with a crew tomorrow to tackle that job. Lots of tweaking and jacking of things up and down was required to get the beam into place. The final position required some long 2x4s to lift the last crossways beam on the deck up to slide the 4×12 under it. (You can see them in the photo above on the right side behind Chris.) Of course any lifting of one part requires equal, or near equal lifting of all other parts, lest we suddenly have one of the jacks come loose. It was slow going, but we finally got it all done.

Christopher really liked the small but very heavy hammer I used to motivate the beams into final positions. He decided to name it “Mjöllnir.” It was nice to have the heft to move these heavy objects with small taps rather than having to really bash it… especially since we were underneath it all! We managed to get it all squared up, so it is as good as new. Once summer comes I’ll paint it to match the rest of the house and deck.

I even managed to get the jacks back to the rental place before 2pm on Sunday when they closed.