**Deck Saga 2021**
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At that point, we stalled. 😫 We covered up the foundation with house wrap, and left it for the winter.
(And had a very nice regular life, for a while.)
(Climbing in and out of our back door via a tall step stool.)
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Jump ahead to spring 2019: we hired a crew to jack up the back of the house and replace the foundation. Fun!
Then in summer we were back at the deck.
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Then we got the house painted! (Not shown here.) The painters put up a bunch of new cedar shake, overlapping all that flashing, and replaced all the cracked shake.
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Then, winter again.
(We did a TON of interior electrical work. And replaced the attic windows.)
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Spring / summer / fall 2020:
* COVID!
* We built an 8x4 raised bed!
* We tore out our furnace and all basement ductwork (ourselves)! (And had professionals install the new one.)
* We cleaned out the garage, did a bunch of wiring and lighting, spray-foamed the walls (and parts of the basement crawl spaces), and made clean walls / shelves / storage!
* We put up new ledger boards for the deck! (No pictures of the work, though.)
* We bought deck furniture at a great price, knowing we were going to build a deck the next summer!
(And, you know, regular life.)
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Winter 20 / 21:
* Still COVID!
* We had a tree removed and put a fire pit in its place!
* We did a bunch more electrical work!
* I built a shop air cleaner out of the old furnace blower and used it while I scraped all the efflorescence off the basement walls!
* We used four bottle jacks, six posts, 2 6x6's, and 4 4x4's to replace the rotting support columns and jack the whole house about 3/4" (over the course of 8 weeks)!
* And cracked the plaster / drywall all over the place - but the windows and doors are all fine!
(And, you know, regular life.)
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April 2021:
* Owner/CEO of my really-great-company sells it out from under all of us; new owners are evil.
* Oh no - what if we have to move? The house has no deck!
* I find a job with a new really-great-company where I won't have to move (🎉) and I'll have two weeks off between jobs!
* And I'm not going another year without a deck, dammit!
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(...and got permits...)
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Now, it's important to know that I ordered all the materials about 6 weeks before I was supposed to have that two weeks off between jobs.
And the materials had all arrived at Menards about two weeks before that time between jobs.
But they couldn't deliver them to me until *the week I started the new job*.
(And you can't pick up ~10,000lbs of material with your SUV.)
So what was meant to be a two-week, full-time job, turned into an all-summer, weekends-and-nights job.
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Note that while I was laying out the post locations, I learned that the two back walls of the house weren't co-planar 😠. So if I made the deck (and the decking) parallel to one of the walls, it would be off by about 1.5" by the time I got to the other end of the deck.
So my original plan of just running the decking boards straight across the deck was going to highlight / emphasize that problem.
So we decided to switch to diagonal decking, which requires a lot more wood, a lot more planning, and a lot more work.
And we decided to "picture-frame" the decking, to help hide the discrepancy and make it look nicer.
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(Because we're masochists, apparently.)
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(Then a one-weekend break to paint my mom's great room, which was her Christmas present from two Christmases prior, but COVID 🙁)
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