The New Deck Project

The summer tires are on the Jeep. I don’t usually wait until three days before the deadline to get the snow tires taken off, but I just haven’t had time. I was at the tire place a few minutes after they opened and they took the Jeep right away.

On the way home from town, I stopped at the community center to finish the clean-up from the plant sale. The food bank came on Tuesday to get the leftover plants. Susan coordinated that process because I was in town all day. Once the plants are gone, we have to get the tarps up off the floor, vacuum, and move all the furniture back into place.

After lunch, I put down the rest of the row cover so I could I plant the cabbages, peppers, and more of the squash. We had afternoon thunderstorms in the forecast again and I wanted to get as much in as I could before the weather went sideways. With such a short growing season, every day that a plant spends in the ground matters.

A very impressive line of thunderstorms did come up from the south, but it missed us by a hair. It went right up the Continental Divide (just to our east, over the mountains) and I watched it from the garden. I heard thunder and the weather station was picking up lightning some miles away.

While I was working in the garden, the husband and the crew were deep into the deck project at the rental house. They had already ripped off the front portion of the deck by the time I got home. (Husband is in the middle.)

They salvaged what they could but a lot of the wood was rotten and went straight to the burn pile.

The side deck was the next part to come off.

And then the husband brought in the excavator and the track loader to remove excess dirt and smooth out the ground.

This house was built in the mid-80s and he has had to retrofit parts of it because the construction was a bit skimpy. The posts holding up the side roof were resting on bits of concrete poured into holes in the ground. The new deck will have posts set into sonotubes. That roof is going to need to be replaced at some point, but we’re tackling one project at a time.

I am not sure what he plans for the replacement deck. He told me it’s still a blank canvas but he also knows that he’s going to have to let me in on the details at some point. 🤨

I feel like I have been running non-stop for the past week and a half. The house is a disaster area, which it always is at this time of year. Dinner has been whatever I can throw together at the last minute, although last night, I made Salisbury steak because I somehow remembered to take ground beef out to thaw. I made enough for two meals. We’re getting desperately low on canned goods, like beef and chicken stock, so I am going to have to do some canning soon. And I don’t need to tell you there has been no sewing.

Charlotte is somewhere in the greenhouse, although I haven’t been able to locate her. As expected, she moved overnight. I keep wondering if I am going to come downstairs some morning and she’s going to be in the corner of the kitchen again, like a dog that travels miles to get back to its family. I have no idea how she got into the house the first time, so it wouldn’t surprise me a bit to see her again.

Someone from QuickBooks has been leaving messages on my phone all week wanting to talk to me about “new features” for our construction company. I answered his call yesterday while I was out in the garden. (I sounded like I was on a construction site because the guys were working on the deck. 😇) He wanted to know if he could schedule a 15-minute call to explain the new AI tools. I told him that I don’t want more automation. What I want is for QuickBooks to get the hell out of my way so I can just do my job. The husband said the poor guy was probably traumatized after he talked to me.