Rats, so, I blew it already. I was supposed to blog every day and I missed yesterday. No great honking surprise, I guess. Anyway, here's something for today. It's cold here, brrr. It's been dropping down into the 20's at night. Maybe not hugely cold for some of you, but that's about as cold as it gets here. It really makes me feel bad for Susan when she goes out to feed the horses in the morning. Worse, when she gets up, she lets in a draft of cold air under the covers.

Cold or not, one of the projects I'm working on now is a deck for the side of the house. It's a little more complicated than I can handle, so I've got the help of Phil, one of our neighbors, and a buddy of his, Mark. To place its location, let's first step briefly into the Wayback Machine.

In the beginning, there was this (no, not Kenya, nor even a little bit of snow, look into the background). This was the location of, as Vernon (Mr. Altman, to you, Sonny) so aptly named it, the "White Trash Pool", more formerly known as a Doughboy. We moved the pool to a neighbor with kids for the hard-driving bargain price of $0. This is on the east side of the house. In case it's not obvious from the photo, the grassy part where Kenya is sniffing drops off about five feet to a flat spot where lied the pool.

So, the plan was to build the World's Biggest and Most Expensive Deck Imaginable. Well, to be fair, that wasn't precisely the original plan in so many words, it's just kind of turned out that way. I'm not quite sure when we broke ground, but this picture was taken on 9/19. The viewpoint from this photo is almost the same as the one with Kenya above, so it should give you some idea of the positioning of the Monstrosity.

There are two things that make this deck:

• cool


• harder than I can do by myself

The first thing is an area designed to hold a hottub. Hottubs are not heavy, particularly. You'd get the same load on the deck as you would inviting over four of me (though why you'd want to, I can't imagine. You'd never get a word in edgewise). But hottubs on their own aren't really much fun: not, at least, until you put water in them. Then they get really heavy, like having 40 of me standing in the same place on the deck. Here's where we would stand.

The second bit that makes this deck too complicated for my little head and clumsy fingers is a walkway that runs around the perimeter. We did this to avoid an unsightly railing, which is necessary if the deck surface is more than three feet above grade. Well, just don't walk off this end in a drunken stupor. If you did, and then turned back around to look at the house, or, more likely, to curse at me and ask for a phone to call your lawyer, this is what you'd see.

Hopefully, we'll be able to finish it soon. A hottub would be just to thing to fight this non-California sub-freezing weather.
- posted by Colin @ 3:14 PM