Deck Demo, Day One

It’s outdated, useless, ugly and rotting. No, not Pat Robertson. Well, him too, but mostly our deck railing. 

We started our deck remodel project this weekend with demolition on the railing and the outer decking boards that needed to be removed since the railing supports went through them. 

Before:

As is always the case with projects like this, it turned out to be a lot harder than we thought. Some of the supports were bolted on and they were a real pain to remove. Then the nails. We know from previous remodeling jobs that the local dump will only accept construction debris if all the nails are removed. Yes, they’re really, really picky about garbage. It has to be sorted into particular types – this would be “inert – non-compostable” by their standards. And yes, they inspect the garbage to make sure it meets their high garbage standards and gets dumped into the proper section. So even if you hate your job, there’s someone who has a worse job, and that would be the person who has to inspect every load of garbage that goes into our city dump.

So I spent all day Saturday and most of Sunday pounding and pulling out rusty nails and then sawing the sections up to fit into the truck bed. We not only have a beautiful view of the lake, but we can also hear the louder boats and jet skis. The lake was beautiful all weekend. So we got to see and hear people out there having fun while we pounded, hacked and sawed under the hot sun, and our boat sat lonely and unused on our shore station.

Sunday morning I had the truck full so Dean made a trip to the dump while I pounded and pulled the nails from the last pile of boards and sawed them up to truck bed length. I finished the last one, went inside and opened the fridge. Oh, pinot grigio. You look delicious but wine and a chain saw are not an advisable combination and we have more demo to do so I reached for the iced tea instead. Then the phone rang. It was Dean at the dump.

Dean: “Stop what you’re doing, and don’t be mad.”

Oh boy. “Okay, what’s the deal?”

Dean: “Ummm . . . we didn’t need to pull all those nails. They don’t make you do that any more.”

Apparently they changed their rules last fall. I could have chain-sawed those boards to truck bed length in about an hour Saturday morning. Instead I spent most of the weekend pounding out and pulling out what seemed like about a million rusty nails. For no reason. We could have been out on that lovely lake most of the weekend. Instead of . . . pulling rusty nails under the hot sun.

I put the iced tea back. Pinot grigio, come here. We have a date. On our partially-demoed deck.

If our budget, patience and strength all hold out, we might demo the back deck, too. Which we can do in about an hour. Since we don’t have to pull all those friggin’ NAILS.

After day one: 

We're using chairs and potted plants to keep the dogs away from the edge. 

Next demo day - Wednesday. We'll take down the pergola, remove a few more boards and get all the stuff off the deck. The contractors show up Thursday morning, and Dean and I will be their crew - they gave us a break on the project since we can do the stupid stuff. Like pulling nails.