June 23, 2013 – 15yearsandcountingdream

I know in last week’s post I was Debbie Downer, but this weekend has been awesome. The week overall was a disaster, but the weekend put me back in a good frame of mind.

We started the week with Lynn having gone to the emergency room a week ago Friday. Then on Tuesday he had to get two injections in his lower spine area. These injections had not worked before, but he was out of options. Amazing, they worked pretty good, I just hope he didn’t overdo it this weekend. When Papa is happy, everybody is happy. When he isn’t, God help us. Now he will get to rest a little while I go to work through the week.

The porch is coming along nicely, but the rest of the property has gone to the dogs. We have weed 3 feet high weeds and everything is dying from lack of care. My flower beds are filled with debris and need watering, but the porch comes first. Then some cleanup and it will be time for winter. Ugh!! Not going there, back to the porch.

Today we laid our first decking boards. Then we picked up momentum and about a third of the deck is down. Lynn had a goal of getting enough boards down to be able to move the freezer over. Yes we have a freezer on our back porch! I know the “hillbilly” has to come through sometime. The freezer is a chest type and it is almost 25 years old and still runs good. Lynn bought it just before we got married in July, 25 years ago. I really did not want to have it on my NEW back porch, but, alas, that is where we would have to put the new one until be get the dream home built. So it really doesn’t make sense at this time. May go with an upright when the time comes.

Back to goals. I like it when Lynn has a goal, because things get done. We finished at about 3:30 just as it started to rain. What timing. Maybe next week we will be another 1/3 of the way. We have to work around that monster stump. Lynn measured the diameter and it was about 36-42″ across. It’s not moving, so we are going to do what the pioneers before us did, build around it. I think that stump is what actually determined what the depth of the porch was going to be. It’s dimensions of the porch will be 8 foot by 19 foot. A fair sized porch. Remember when the deck is done, then comes the roof and railings, so there is still a ways to go.

To take you through what was done today. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the floor I wanted to be in a picture frame style. With the outside edge done with mitered corners, and then the boards laid perpendicular to the house. Since we are constructing around that darn freezer we were not able to just tear the whole porch off, which would have been much simpler. So we had to put temporary boards along the front until we are able to get the other 2×8 put along in front of the stump. We will be using pressure treated posts but will not be able to dig down to put in the concrete footing like we did before. So that will be a challenge. But Lynn is up to it. 🙂

Then I drilled pilot holes and drove in 3″ deck screws. There is no bounce!!! Each board was cut and fitted, and it looks awesome. We used pipe clamps and an 8″ C-clamp to pull and push each board to its correct position. Speaking of pipe clamps, watch out for the wild Scotsman wielding the pipe as it made contact with my head. Made me see stars for a few minutes. Guess it’s okay, no goose egg yet. Usually, I don’t need help getting hurt, I have two left feet and am not the most graceful 62 year old. But that is why I have a guardian angel by my side.

Porch look darn near perfect. Right, I know it had no where to go but up. The toughest thing to do was to move the freezer. We put two 1 1/4″ pipes under it and rolled it over onto the finished side. That cleared the way for “full-speed-ahead.”

As for the rest of today, I have to finish laundry. Make dinner which will be sausage and eggs. Make a taco salad for a work pot-luck tomorrow. Plus 2 key lime pies for dessert. Take a shower and work on my quilt. See you next week.

Now for the photos.

Annie, the novice porch builder