Last year, when I tackled the fence in our backyard, the thing that got the whole project going in the first place was the deck. It was unsafe, a liability lawsuit waiting to happen.
As things went, I ran out of time before I got to the deck itself. However, I’m now happy to say that the eyesore in our backyard which passed for a deck (at some earlier point in its career) has been removed. Yesterday, I took the good old wrecking bar and sledgehammer to it. Its parts are now a pile of (mostly) rotten, nail-filled pieces of wood at the landfill.
I thoroughly enjoyed destroying the deck. Maybe it’s a guy thing. There’s just something exhilarating about swinging a sledgehammer with all the force you can muster and seeing the splintered wood fly.
While demolishing the deck, I had a chance to “admire” the handiwork of the person who built the deck. What a mess! He also didn’t spend a whole lot on materials; he must have found a deal on railway ties and decided to build a deck using nothing but the railway ties and some recycled four-by-fours and two-by-fours.
He even made good use of the existing vegetation in his backyard. During the demolition, I discovered what appeared to be a tree stump functioning as a support for the deck floor. Here I’m resting one of the last railway ties on the stump while I get ready to muscle it onto the truck.
Today, Pam and I set the foundation for the new deck.
environmentalism taken to the extreme….