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Build A Deck

Hey Folks! It’s the end of a long holiday weekend in Canada, cottage country, my cottage country was hopping this weekend as folks turned out for the first long weekend of summer, well technically Spring, but it with temperatures reaching as high as 30 degrees Celsius it felt like Summer!

This was what I like to call a “power weekend” at the camp, in other words, it was full of activity and very productive activity at that. It started on Friday watching my daughter walk across the stage to accept her first university degree, a BA come laudee…..not sure how to spell come laudee but I know it is something like that.

Then it was off to meet her boyfriends folks for supper, he also graduated on Friday, a proud day for all of us!

Then it was off to the cottage for Wendy and I, we were meeting our friends Doug and Darlene as we had a full weekend planned of cottage repairs, boating, and some laughs as well, including some fun games of darts in the evenings.

Doug, what can I say about Doug, you all know Doug, he is my all round handyman and good friend, I’ve mentioned here before on several occasions. He is one of those guys who can do damn near anything from fix a car to build a house, and I am testing that theory by getting him to fix my car one minute and build a house the next…..well not really a house, I am getting him to build a deck, or veranda as we always seem to call them in my part of cottage country.

Our side entrance at the cottage, the kitchen entrance and the one we use the most, had seen better days. It was about 8′ X 5′ about 25 years old and needing more than paint to fix it up. In fact, there was no point in painting it again.

So it bit the dust this weekend, it was time to build a deck in it’s place. Here it is just before I took it off the house, as you can see, it has seen better days……

However, all is not lost, we are recyclers if nothing else, so what we didn’t burn up in the campfire Saturday night, I turned into a new piece of floating dock with the addition of some Styrofoam blocks. I just couldn’t bear to see a ready made wharf float go to waste or be burned up, and with a new wharf on the to-do list this year, it seemed like the thing to do. I told you I am resourceful if not handy…..

The new deck is now quite a bit larger and much more functional, there is room to sit a couple of chairs and a view of the lake, the woods behind the camp, our little vegetable garden and even a view up the driveway, none of which we had with the old deck. We had the materials to build a deck delivered Friday and started work early Saturday morning, ripping off the old deck in preparation for the new one. This was one of those do-it-yourself projects that went smoothly, and because technically I didn’t ‘do-it-myself’ I had some help.

Well I can’t tell ya how nice it is to build a deck and how it inspired me to find even more projects around the camp much to Doug’s chagrin I think, Ha Ha! I tried pretty hard to tire him out through the day but he and Wendy managed to beat Darlene and I at some exciting dart games in the evenings. We had them on the run, but by the end of the weekend there was no doubt they were the champs!

But back to our build a deck project. This morning I took a quick trip to the nearby Home Hardware store and bought some fence boards to finish the railing, the final chapter in the deck building project and the job was done!

This afternoon, with the temperature still quite high, we loaded into Doug and Darlene’s new speedboat and headed for a run up the lake, to the end and back, a great way to finish off a great weekend.