Good bye old deck

I ripped my old deck down this weekend….What a pain in the butt. Board by board…nail by nail. I started at the top and ripped off the rails, then the lattice on the sides, then the decking. The best tool ever made for demolition is the wonderbar. It’s a curvy L-shaped prybar with a nail slot on the end. I used it freehand at the beginning, then I bolted a 5 foot piece of a 1 X 4 board to it for maximum leverage and just went to town. Now I’ve got a pile instead of a deck. I’ve also got a 2 gallon bucket full of rusty old nails of every size and configuration imaginable. The crappy part was the stairs. That was a nightmare to pull apart, but I did it. Now that its gone I just need to pull the rest of the nails out of a few boards and design the new deck. I’ll take measurements this week and lay out the whole mess in autocad. My septic tank is exactly where I don’t want it to be, so I have to design the deck around it. I just got back from National home center where I got a bunch of prices on wood and joist hangers, piers, etc. Now I need to go to Lowes and a few other places to get comparison prices. The end results will kick major ass.

I wrote a poem a while back was running through my head the whole time I worked this weekend. It’s apropos, so here it is.

Sweat

yearning to taste the fruits of the tasks
that are forcing my cells to relinquish the atoms
that not only kept me alive for a while
but coursed through the phloem of ten thousand trees
and carved out the canyons and valleys I see
from the site of my latest endeavor

Also, for fathers day, my sweet angel gave me an awesome present that she picked out herself. 2 super soaker water guns. So we filled ‘em up and went outside and sprayed each other until we couldn’t stand it any more. Awesome!

The new neighbors

I live in a rural neighborhood outside of a college town. It’s a hilly and densely forested area a few miles outside of town. The lots are all 2 to 3 acres and it’s a peaceful place. The land sold cheap about 30 years ago, and lots of people snatched up the lots and put trailers on their property. Mos of those people were looking for a place to retire. So….as the property becomes available again, younger families are moving in, hauling off the trailers, and building houses. We were lucky, our house was in place and waiting when we found it. The couple who used to live next door had a really shiddy trailer, and used to tell me about their big plans to build a house on the property, but about 6 months ago they told us that they were selling and moving out. Their crappy trailer was worthless, so they were selling cheap. Now and again I’d see hillbillies jumpin out of their trucks to go look at the place. They showed the place to lots of people I didn’t want next door, but I was powerless. When they told us they found a buyer, I braced myself…..but they said they were selling to a young couple with a little girl my daughters age, so thats good. The old owners moved out a couple weeks ago, and the new ones arrived and started painting, repairing, and putting up a fence. Their little girl has already become my daughters new best friend and things are going good. The other couple was nice enough, but not real smart. The husband was an electrician and seemed cool, but his wife told us once that they have financial problems because he ran up thousands of dollars in bills to some 1-900 chat line. That’s creepy. The wife was friendly, but if the topic of conversation got more complicated than “the people across the street”, or “bubbas new truck” her eyes would start rolling back in her head. I kinda expected the same from the new neighbors, but when I first met them, they introduced their dog as “terra”, and said they named her that because her spots reminded them of Pangea breaking up as continental drift progressed. We invited them over last weekend and spent hours talking smack and laughing without a single eye rolling. They’re both intelligent and nice, and as it turns out, they bought the property to build a new house on. Whew…….

AC man

So finally, the AC man showed up at 7:30 last night. Turns out my suspicions were correct…there was funk clogging the drain line. He had a tank of nitrogen with 500 pounds of pressure in it. A pile of hellish goo blasted into the yard where the drain pipe evacuates its bladder. It was really gross. He said from now on I should pour a cup of bleach into the pipe every month or so and that’ll never happen again. He checked out the freon and gave the air conditioner a once over. The 20 minutes he was there cost me about $85, but hey…. It was worth it to have someone who looks at air conditioners all day give it a clean bill of health. High five to the AC man!

Bad stuff sucks

Since I bought my house 4 years ago, I’ve had irrational fears of awful things happening to it. I’ve imagined it slowly scooting downhill and collapsing into a pile of rubble, I’ve imagined colonies of extraterrestrial fluorescent molds habitating the nether regions of the crawlspace, I’ve imagined infestations and pestilence. None has come to pass, but the other day……. I opened the furnace to replace my air filter, and when I pulled out the disgusting gray caked patty I noticed that it was soaking wet! I freaked out and looked into the chamber below the filter and the floor was soaked, the sheetrock was mildewy and warped, and I freaked out. I’ve had a headache for a week, and suddenly the big picture came crashing down on me. No, my crawlspace isn’t teeming with alien molds, however, the one place through which all air must pass in my house is contaminated and giving us all a runny nose and a headache. I replaced the filter anyway, and put a huge towel under the drip temporarily until the AC man can come blow out my drain pipes. I’ll probably have to cut out the sheetrock and replace it. Since I had to do something to make myself feel better, I ripped apart my vacuum cleaner and cleaned every tube and filter. Psychologically this had a positive effect on me, but the AC guy just called and told me he cant come until tomorrow. It’s really freaking me out. I saw a 20/20 special once where a house was overtaken by molds and mildews and everyone was sick. It was so bad they had to tear it down and build a new one. Freakin Yuck.