The octagon is finished:
It’s now Mindy’s new window
The winter basement project is now complete. There is another stained glass project in the works, but it’s not an octagon so I don’t had to mess with any special angles other than 90 degrees.
Here’s the glass mounted in Mindy’s window:
View from indoors
View from outdoors
Here’s the situation:
The back yard as of June 24, 2010
It’s been almost two years and we put up with this crummy cement slab porch long enough! It’s time to put in a deck! Of course we had to re-route the sprinkler system and move some loose stones (where you see the bare earth in the picture above).
Truck delivering the goods
We decided on using Trek® composite for the deck boards and treated lumber for the support. There was a sale on an appropriate color of Trek® at the local Home Depot and now we have it.
Building materials sitting in our driveway!
OK. I build banjos and Magic Agogo Belts and I did a few home improvements over the years, but I’ve never attempted something this big. I now have all this crap in my driveway and I better do something with it soon or the HOA will start sending me nasty letters! What we have here is a lot of heavy lifting: From left to right we have 52 Deck Blocks, assorted 12 foot long 2×6 and 4×4 treated lumber and finally 53 12 foot long composite boards. Thanks to everyone who came out to help lift and carry and put things into place!
The supports are in!
It didn’t take long to get this started. It’s really just a simple 12×24 deck about 24 inches off the ground. How hard could that be?
Oops, a design change in the middle of the project!
Jeanne would like a bench on the south side of the deck. I decided to include a semi-cantilevered bench design held together with lag bolts top and bottom. Â It sure seems strong enough… One good drunken party will tell!
Are we done yet?
The final part was getting the composite boards screwed into the supports. It took at least a week of screwing around to get that done!
The deck furniture and grill now fits!
…with room to spare for the gazebo and hot tub! But there’s no time to do that right now. I’ve got to prepare for the annual feast of the Ragbrai and my hands are a mess from drilling in all those deck screws. Lots of banjo playing is in order for the next few days!
i.e., we are getting rid of some juniper bushes!
It’s the VW Pickup Truck!
Jeannie and I packed the back seat of the VW with juniper bushes that we removed from our back landscape to make room for our next project: A BRAND NEW DECK! Â So, there are a number of Summer-time projects that are keeping me from updating this blog as much as I used to; I hope to be finished with the deck before the great annual feast of the RAGBRAI! Oh, and it’s nice to see the old VW still out and about on July 1st, 2010.
Happy to see this get into compost
We drove on out to Hageman Earth Cycle to dump the junipers off for composting; never been there before. That place is huge! They can deliver to your door up to 80 cubic yards of mulch at a time!
