Yep, so the deck project started in April.  To be fair, it was the very end of April.  It was supposed to take 3 weeks.  Of course, then it rained for 6 weeks pretty much without stopping.  Mike and Frank made great progress in June, but then Mike disappeared for all of July.  We found out at the end of July that he had hurt his back and wouldn’t be back until this week.  He returned on Tuesday and progress has resumed at a rapid pace. Fortunately today his back is much better.  We were very worried about him overdoing it and being permanently hurt.  The photo below is what the deck has looked like since the end of June.

We may not have our mosquito-free sanctuary until the end of mosquito season, but at least pretty soon we will have railings.  We now have a roof over the second story deck and all of the second story deck boards got anchored today.  We hope that this means that our dining room will finally stop leaking every time it rains.  Of course, now we have a new project — repairing all of the water-damaged plaster around the window.  I also fear that our newfound watertightness will mean that there will be no more rain in DC this summer.   I hope that’s not the case.

During the hiatus, Frank filled our gabion walls with some of concrete mountain.  The process went more quickly than we had expected and the result is great!  He has been on the lookout for any free bricks on Freecycle for the past year, and he actually scored several carloads on two separate occasions.  So, the outside of the gabion walls will be brick and the inside is where all the concrete is, as you can sort of see in this picture.

The portion that is submerged underground is completely concrete chunks (9 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet). This photo, from 6/24/09, is of the pit with the empty baskets and Frank dropping the ceremonial first chunk of concrete to start the wall.  It’s a little hard to tell how deep the hole is, but Frank can vouch that it’s 3 feet — he lifted every bit of dirt, clay, and rock out of the pit himself!

We will duplicate this process with the garage wall, thereby hopefully getting rid of most of the concrete that we took out of the backyard as well as the remainder of concrete mountain.  The timing of that will depend on when Frank finds a new job and actually has to be somewhere else during the day.

Mike is very happy to have Frank’s full-time help on the deck.  Frank has been charged with cutting the boards that will be the railings — a long and tedious but instantly gratifying task.  We chose to use a semi-environmentally friendly form of pressure treated wood for the deck boards and the support structures.  This was because we couldn’t get FSC-certified cedar and because we could get FSC-certified pressure treated that also has no arsenic.  However, Mike had a contact that had some Spanish cedar sitting in his garage that he didn’t need.  So we bought his Spanish cedar and Frank is making it custom sized for our railings.  It smells wonderful and looks great!  Once the rest of the deck is stained, we expect that the difference between the two woods won’t be so obvious.

Stay tuned for the Schipegan version of the New Yankee Workshop, starring “Norm” Schipegan.