In which is railing

or, Return of the Deck.

I didn't take a lot of pictures (well, any pictures) of the first week of work. This is the earliest one, and it's from my dumbphone, so forgive the quality.

This was the end of the first week. The stairs at the far end had been ripped out, by the simple method of picking them up and walking away. They have been replaced with a rose trellis, supporting the massive rambling roses that were planted on each side of the stairs. NOTE: if you plant roses by a walkway, the roses are going to win.

Above is a better view of the trellis, across the romantic vista of stacks of pressure treated lumber. The top half is pretty thin, but the bottom half is way tighter than the code requires, so that's all right.

This is the other side of the trellis, with most of the roses put back up. For a while, I thought I was going to have to chainsaw them down to about six inches, just to get at the deck to work, but it was never quite necessary, and my hands are healing up nicely.

Because I'm not a jerk, I did leave them with a working set of stairs, almost to code. Note the lovely lag bolts holding stuff together. Nothing makes a 2x4 go straight like a 4x4 and a lag bolt. Better than a straight-from-the shoulder talk from a salty but caring Irish priest.

In the background are several pots of plants that my wife planted while she was there. Plants are not my department, until they're sawn into dimensional lumber.

And so, I had to leave it for a week. I was exhausted, I was missing my wife, and my hands hurt more than I could have imagined. On the plus side, I did get the railing well up, and I had learned a lot about decks. More shortly, on What the Cornet Player Did Next.