A little bit of colour arrives

Well this past week saw less work than normal being done as I worked an extra day this week. In the weeks coming up this will happen again as people go on vacation at work and we need to cover for them. Another thing was that on Tuesday my youngest uncle and his wife showed up from Kalamazoo and on Wednesday I was distracted by a fellow who was prepping a 1960 B100 International truck for removal from the neighbours house. It was nice to show off what I had done so far to more family members and it was also nice to be able to meet with uncle Drew and Barb. They kindly dropped off a small house warming present and I now have some flowers hanging on my back porch. Here you can see the hangers they dropped off.

So anyway the work that happened this week was as follows.

On Monday night after work I cut up all the remaining 1by8 pine so that it was ready to be installed as soffiting on the front deck. 

On Tuesday we started work on the front deck. As before I installed a 2by6 rim joist on the house securing it to the concrete basement wall with concrete anchors. Above this I sat the 2by8 rim joist for the actual deck joists. This rested on the 2by6 and was secured to the house  by Tapcon screws into the row of concrete blocks I had the Masons install before they laid down the stone work. Then it was back to the brick pile to break up brick to be used on top of the landscape fabric and under the deck joists. One wheelbarrow load of brick took about 45min to break up and covered about 3ft of deck or two joist spaces. Considering that there is about 34ft of deck I had about 10 wheel barrow loads to do. So this work continued into Wednesday as well. By the end of Wednesday we were still not complete however a decent portion has been done. As well I will be about 6-8ft short of having enough broken brick to cover all the dirt. This means that on Tuesday will need to go to work with the trailer and pickup a 1/2 yard of red stone. I will continue to use this stone for all the landscape coverings as I go along. Here is a picture of the front deck as it sits right now.

As well one evening last week I dug a small trench from the ditch at the road up to one of my downspouts. I'll place a piece of Big-O pipe in this and hook it up to the downspout so that the rainwater has a direct path to the ditch instead of onto the future lawn area. Once I move most of the front dirt pile I'll also dig another small trench for the other downspout on the other end of the deck. In the picture above you can just see a part of the pipe I have temporarily laying on the ground to bring the water to the ditch. I've also started to pull out the weeds from the dirt pile you can see in the above picture on the right side. I want to get all the big weeds out before I start spreading this soil around on the front yard in preparation for grass seed this fall.

So for the coming week the plan is to finish the front deck hopefully and time permitting look at working on the stone work on the garage so that I can think about installing the vinyl siding. I also have to think about framing out the small storage shed at the back of the garage. So still plenty of work to do. 

Until next week have a great summer and enjoy your vacations.

Harold