So, we finally decided to build us a deck! What started to be a simple
project of a deck with an octagon (stop sign for all of you who forgot
your geometry 😉 ) in it, pretty much became the deck project from hell.
We hired a construction company to pour the posts and frame the deck in.
Once they had their part done, I ordered the decking material. Little did
I know we wouldn’t have quite enough material to finish the deck (mostly
Home Depot’s fault), but at this point I was getting pretty excited! The
material was in at Home Depot, so I called my dad and told him he should
come up the next weekend to help get this thing done. The decking came, my
dad was here, we were ready to begin, well almost, we had to of course hit
Pat’s on a beer run.

We started hauling the decking into the backyard. The guy who delivered
it was a pro fork-lift operator, but didn’t want to cut across the
neighbors lawn on the backside (come on… wuss). We started cutting the
boards at what we thought was the right angle to fit the octagon. After a
few cuts, many screws (who the hell invented a square-headed screw, that
was a bad idea!) we found out the boards weren’t landing on the octagon at
the right angle. Out comes the measuring tape, only to find out one side
of the octagon was a few inches shorter than the other sides. Even the
non-math types can tell you this is probably a bad thing. It was getting
late so we decided to pick up in the morning. The next day went a little
better, we ran to the hardware store and home depot about a dozen times,
got some boards down and compensated for the short-sided octagon.
Then, we ran into a design flaw in the plans where some boards weren’t
supported, so we had to put supports in… that slowed us down quite a
bit… After getting a few non-octagon boards down, we figured it be a
good idea to see how parallel the outside is to the house… We found out
it was off by an inch… that’s right 2.54 cm, 1/12 foot, 1/36 yard… an
inch off!? Luckily we were pro deck builders and compensated for such an
error, you can’t even tell the end doesn’t run parallel to the house.
Our next biggest issue was the sixteen foot board that ran next to the
house, that needed to be ripped and etched out for the back door. After
giving one board a shot on the table saw that was sitting on the ground,
we didn’t think it be possible to actually do that. Seeing as how there
was a board with a notch in the one side (see deck pictures), we thought
we’d try to rip that one. Somehow, we got that board cut, etched, and in
place, and it doesn’t just look good, it looks really good! We made a lot
of progress this day, even though we spent a couple hours at the shop
getting my dad’s truck to start. The mechanics were awfully chatty,
especially the tow-truck guy who stuck around to talk… er.. see if the
truck would start once the battery terminals were cleaned up.

After meeting up with my dad’s cousin after church, we were back on the
deck for a twelve hour day. We nearly finished the board laying part, and
decided to call it a day. There were only a couple boards to put down, and
I called in to tell my boss I’d be late for work. She told me to take a
personal day (a nice gesture until I found out what she had in store for
me later that week). We managed to get the octagon done along with the
rest of the boarding and it looked really good.

We (and when I say “we” I really mean Susan and Maria the Home Depot
deck consultant) decided it would be easier if we got railing kits, well I
tell you what, those railing kits are not fun to put in. We got one up and
it was pretty wobbly, until we thought we’d try two brackets for each 4×4
post. It added a little bit of stability to it, but not quite as much as I
would have liked to see. At this point it was getting dark again and we
didn’t have quite enough brackets anyway. The next day I had to go into
work, but when I got home we tried to put in an angled railing (that
didn’t go so well). With two railings up and half of a third one, I had to
leave the deck unfinished as I was “lucky” enough to get sent on a
business trip.

I thought the deck project was a project from hell… well that doesn’t
even compare to the fun I had in Alabama. We got onsite and started
getting ready to load our new phone system/software. We ran into issues,
and didn’t leave the central station until 1:00 AM CST. The next day
didn’t go much better, but we were running off the new stuff. To make
matters worse, the central station manager tried transferring files to a
server and one of the files were corrupt that was needed by the system. If
that wasn’t bad enough, Thursday early morning the station actually went
offline. That was bad, very bad! People’s lives depend on that station to
be up and running, any downtime could mean life or death. We found out, it
wasn’t anything to do with our new software (good for us), but it was a
LOT of long hours and little doing anything else. We also had to be on
site to see if something from our software would crash/error out.
At one point I was actually watching the central by myself (the shift
supervisor had left, my co-worker had left to get some sleep, it was me
and the operators). From what I observed over the past couple days, I was
actually able to answer the operators questions and help them through some
stuff, until the next shift supervisor finally showed up. The operators
were pretty nice (one of them even made me a pepperoni hot pockets and
gave me some chips, yeah my eating schedule was thrown completely out of
whack this week…) After trying to optimize his program as much as he
could, we determined the problems we were having was a networking issue
and managed to get it resolved (two IPs, one card, windows server, bad
idea in my opinion). Saturday night was the first night I actually got to
relax this week, and it felt kind of nice. I ended up hitting the jacuzzi
to make it even better before I have to go home and face the project I
left behind and my loving wife (who was none too happy when we had to stay
a couple extra days to get this crap working… maybe a blog entry will
put a smile on her face, a few days later than expected 🙂 )