So, we finally decided to build us a deck! What started to be a simple
\nproject of a deck with an octagon (stop sign for all of you who forgot
\nyour geometry \ud83d\ude09 ) in it, pretty much became the deck project from hell.
\nWe hired a construction company to pour the posts and frame the deck in.
\nOnce they had their part done, I ordered the decking material. Little did
\nI know we wouldn’t have quite enough material to finish the deck (mostly
\nHome Depot’s fault), but at this point I was getting pretty excited! The
\nmaterial was in at Home Depot, so I called my dad and told him he should
\ncome up the next weekend to help get this thing done. The decking came, my
\ndad was here, we were ready to begin, well almost, we had to of course hit
\nPat’s on a beer run.<\/p>\n
We started hauling the decking into the backyard. The guy who delivered
\nit was a pro fork-lift operator, but didn’t want to cut across the
\nneighbors lawn on the backside (come on… wuss). We started cutting the
\nboards at what we thought was the right angle to fit the octagon. After a
\nfew cuts, many screws (who the hell invented a square-headed screw, that
\nwas a bad idea!) we found out the boards weren’t landing on the octagon at
\nthe right angle. Out comes the measuring tape, only to find out one side
\nof the octagon was a few inches shorter than the other sides. Even the
\nnon-math types can tell you this is probably a bad thing. It was getting
\nlate so we decided to pick up in the morning. The next day went a little
\nbetter, we ran to the hardware store and home depot about a dozen times,
\ngot some boards down and compensated for the short-sided octagon.
\nThen, we ran into a design flaw in the plans where some boards weren’t
\nsupported, so we had to put supports in… that slowed us down quite a
\nbit… After getting a few non-octagon boards down, we figured it be a
\ngood idea to see how parallel the outside is to the house… We found out
\nit was off by an inch… that’s right 2.54 cm, 1\/12 foot, 1\/36 yard… an
\ninch off!? Luckily we were pro deck builders and compensated for such an
\nerror, you can’t even tell the end doesn’t run parallel to the house.
\nOur next biggest issue was the sixteen foot board that ran next to the
\nhouse, that needed to be ripped and etched out for the back door. After
\ngiving one board a shot on the table saw that was sitting on the ground,
\nwe didn’t think it be possible to actually do that. Seeing as how there
\nwas a board with a notch in the one side (see deck pictures), we thought
\nwe’d try to rip that one. Somehow, we got that board cut, etched, and in
\nplace, and it doesn’t just look good, it looks really good! We made a lot
\nof progress this day, even though we spent a couple hours at the shop
\ngetting my dad’s truck to start. The mechanics were awfully chatty,
\nespecially the tow-truck guy who stuck around to talk… er.. see if the
\ntruck would start once the battery terminals were cleaned up.<\/p>\n
After meeting up with my dad’s cousin after church, we were back on the
\ndeck for a twelve hour day. We nearly finished the board laying part, and
\ndecided to call it a day. There were only a couple boards to put down, and
\nI called in to tell my boss I’d be late for work. She told me to take a
\npersonal day (a nice gesture until I found out what she had in store for
\nme later that week). We managed to get the octagon done along with the
\nrest of the boarding and it looked really good.<\/p>\n
We (and when I say “we” I really mean Susan and Maria the Home Depot
\ndeck consultant) decided it would be easier if we got railing kits, well I
\ntell you what, those railing kits are not fun to put in. We got one up and
\nit was pretty wobbly, until we thought we’d try two brackets for each 4×4
\npost. It added a little bit of stability to it, but not quite as much as I
\nwould have liked to see. At this point it was getting dark again and we
\ndidn’t have quite enough brackets anyway. The next day I had to go into
\nwork, but when I got home we tried to put in an angled railing (that
\ndidn’t go so well). With two railings up and half of a third one, I had to
\nleave the deck unfinished as I was “lucky” enough to get sent on a
\nbusiness trip.<\/p>\n
I thought the deck project was a project from hell… well that doesn’t
\neven compare to the fun I had in Alabama. We got onsite and started
\ngetting ready to load our new phone system\/software. We ran into issues,
\nand didn’t leave the central station until 1:00 AM CST. The next day
\ndidn’t go much better, but we were running off the new stuff. To make
\nmatters worse, the central station manager tried transferring files to a
\nserver and one of the files were corrupt that was needed by the system. If
\nthat wasn’t bad enough, Thursday early morning the station actually went
\noffline. That was bad, very bad! People’s lives depend on that station to
\nbe up and running, any downtime could mean life or death. We found out, it
\nwasn’t anything to do with our new software (good for us), but it was a
\nLOT of long hours and little doing anything else. We also had to be on
\nsite to see if something from our software would crash\/error out.
\nAt one point I was actually watching the central by myself (the shift
\nsupervisor had left, my co-worker had left to get some sleep, it was me
\nand the operators). From what I observed over the past couple days, I was
\nactually able to answer the operators questions and help them through some
\nstuff, until the next shift supervisor finally showed up. The operators
\nwere pretty nice (one of them even made me a pepperoni hot pockets and
\ngave me some chips, yeah my eating schedule was thrown completely out of
\nwhack this week…) After trying to optimize his program as much as he
\ncould, we determined the problems we were having was a networking issue
\nand managed to get it resolved (two IPs, one card, windows server, bad
\nidea in my opinion). Saturday night was the first night I actually got to
\nrelax this week, and it felt kind of nice. I ended up hitting the jacuzzi
\nto make it even better before I have to go home and face the project I
\nleft behind and my loving wife (who was none too happy when we had to stay
\na couple extra days to get this crap working… maybe a blog entry will
\nput a smile on her face, a few days later than expected \ud83d\ude42 )<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 \ud83d\ude09 ) in it, pretty much became the deck project from hell. We hired a construction company to pour the posts and frame […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[22,3,7],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnjeske.ddns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnjeske.ddns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnjeske.ddns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnjeske.ddns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnjeske.ddns.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/johnjeske.ddns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnjeske.ddns.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnjeske.ddns.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnjeske.ddns.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}