I Built A Deck (with a lot of help)

I know. Where have I been? Why don't I update this blog anymore? What have I been doing with my time? Well, for Kara's 29th birthday in April, I built her a deck. Technically my father-in-law and I built a deck, but since it's my house, I'm claiming all the credit.

Now I've never really built anything like this before. I think the extent of my wood working skills was watching my dad build my pinewood derby car in Indian Guides. So with that vast amount of experience under my belt, how hard could it be? You dig a few holes. Mix a little concrete. Screw some boards together, and voila, you have a deck.

Now if only the county's building inspector thought it was that easy.

But like I said, first we dug the holes. Many of them actually. 16 to be exact. 30 inches deep. Now, since doing that by hand would mean we would be working on this thing until Christmas, we rented a power auger. I naturally thought that would help things go easier. In theory, it might have, except for the fact that it didn't cut through the clay that is abundant in our yard very easily. It didn't help either that by the third hole, we got the auger stuck in the ground with now way to get it up (that's what she said).

Obviously, we got everything dug and ready to move on to step two. What was step two? I had no clue, but I was ready for it.

We put in some posts. We nailed beams together. We put in joists. Kasia was not having a good time. For two weeks, almost every day, she had to find new and different ways to entertain herself because I was unable to play with her. To make it worse, her best friend was knocked out with a really bad fever for almost the entire time we were working on the deck.

After we put on the deck boards and built the railing, we had something that pretty much resembles a deck. Now we have some really nice patio furniture that makes the deck actually usable. We've actually already entertained some friends and family on it. I'm too scared to have too many people on it at the same time because I'm just not that confident in my woodworking skills. Oh, and for the record, my car never did that great in the pinewood derby either. I'm just saying.