Leanin'

The team approved of the wood pile

Not Lean In, the book on how females can break that glass ceiling. Leanin' ... as in what our deck was doing!

At the end of last summer, we were standing in the backyard when Mike let out a word we typically don't use in front of the kids. When asked to identify the cause, he just pointed at the deck and looked like he wanted to be sick. One side of our deck was visibly lower than the other side. Further investigation showed that the support post was rotting out under the ground. Super ...

Dinner on the new deck.
Buggy making faces at my phone

While we have never been thrilled by the small size of our deck, its leaning ways leapfrogged it to the top of the priority list for this year's construction project. Mike braced up the support beam so the deck - and anyone on it - were in no danger of plummeting while we figured out what to do. Mike missed his calling as an architect. He's seriously good at building plans. However, he can get into a bit of a design paralysis and 59 graph paper sketches later, he's all up in his head about making a bad choice and I'm perhaps less than enthusiastic when sketch number 60 arrives under my nose.

We settled on a pretty simple design, but expanded the footprint from 12x10 to 12x16 and moved the stairs from under the drip line - and made them wider. Mike and his dad spent a weekday digging the holes for the new footers and spent a fair part of that day trying to get the auger unstuck from a tree root. Then Mike and my dad poured the footings that weekend and tore down the old deck. Mike's dad came back the next two weekends to help build the new deck and stairs - and put the railings on. It was a lot of work and we are ever so grateful for the grandpa assists!

In progress picture

Mike finished out a few final touches and got it officially inspected and approved just before the big birthday party last weekend. And then he spent part of today cutting the posts to the same height and attaching the post caps. It is officially done - and looks fantastic! We ate dinner on it tonight to celebrate its completion and the final day of summer.

A lot of time was dedicated to the deck project this summer, but as we all sat on the deck in the beautiful weather, eating our burgers, with room for Yogi and people to walk, it definitely felt worth it. Best of all, we aren't leanin' anymore!