Off-Grid in West Virginia

Monday

Seven-thirty this morning Ronald’s green truck rumbled up my drive (bad lifter and all). He brought along his wife Vicki and Blair who is their helper for the day. Today they are going to extend our porch deck out an extra ten feet. Although I like our little porch the way it is, it will be nice to be able to entertain guests and not have them get up and move every time we need to open the door to go into the mud room.

Deck down and Rails up

Before Ronald and his crew could unload his tools the delivery truck carrying the supplies arrived. Now Sonny and I could have attempted to build this deck ourselves but I can’t measure worth a darn and Sonny is accident prone. I can imagine what our porch would look like now. Lopsided and bloody come to mind. Thank goodness we have Ronald and Vicki.

They made short work of the process. Ronald and Blair removed the front railing of the porch being careful to salvage the spindles and other parts that can be reused. No sense in wasting the wood. Then they used the post hole digger and dug three holes for the support posts. Luckily they didn’t hit any boulders. The edges of Ronald’s post hole digger are all bent from previous battles with rocks. It kind of resembles a medieval weapon that has seen way too much action.

Next they put up the side supports and joists. Vicki was the “go for”, and she steadily carried boards, refilled the nail gun, and did any other task that needed to be done. You know, the usual stuff we go fors do. She had a job on her hands trying to hammer out the old nails from the reusable wood so I gave her a hand.

Before long the deck portion was finished and the side rails raised. They were able to put the spindles on the far end before they packed up for the day. The vinyl lattice that will go around the bottom did not make it on todays shipment. If it had I am sure they would have finished up the job. It should be here tomorrow and Ronald and Blair can finish up.

Spindle installation almost complete

My job today was to keep Sonny informed of the progress while he was at work. I took pictures with my Iphone of each step and emailed them to him. All in all I am pleased with the results and I know Sonny and I will enjoy many hours watching the real nature channel that is right outside our door.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 24th, 2010 at 7:20 pm and is filed under Off-Grid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.