In case you’ve forgotten:
Welcome again to Saturday Morning Home Repair blogging, where we talk about fixing houses and the things in them that are supposed to work for us. An ad hoc cadre of building professionals and gifted amateurs attempt to answer questions that arise from readers, and offer encouragement and advice for those inclined to do things for themselves, if they can. We all do a lot of things, collectively, and can probably help out with insights from our vast experience.
Or sometimes, we just gab.
Okay, it seems that few diaries about Casa CJB would be complete without an anecdote involving previous owner, Senor Half-assed. This diary is no different. According to some nabes, Idiot Boy had spent enough time in jail that he couldn’t stand looking at anything that resembled vertical bars. That, apparently, is how you end up with a second story deck design, the railings of which looked like this:
Some of you may remember that I provide childcare for a couple of kids at a time, and all I saw when I looked at this was ready-made ladders to sudden death. So we knew that a deck redesign had to be near the top of the list of DIY projects.
It wasn’t until the next spring that we got to it, but get to it, we did. Out go the horizontals:
In go the verticals:
Et voila. MrCJB, kidCJB on the left, our neighbors’ two girls, and - for whatever unremembered reason - a large zucchini all trying out the new look. We reused as much wood as we could, since we wuz poorish back then.
So. That’s the look it had for 14+ years. The railing was all that we replaced, which will become obvious when I show you the next pic. You wanna talk dry rot? Here is the old and the new, side by side, with KidCJB, and his bestie Marcus helping out. I swear, those old boards weighed bout 4 lbs apiece when we brought them down. We’re lucky no one ever fell through.
Almost there...
Aaaaand, the finished look:
We also put a corrugated “ceiling” under it, so the lower deck stays somewhat dry in front of the dining room slider where we built the outdoor storage.
May this be the last upper deck design under our watch.
What are you all working on this weekend?