The Deck: Almost there

I’d been hoping to report a fait accompli on our eco-friendly, thermally modified, Made-In-Minnesota decking project, but we ran out of boards. (Another project in the 90 percent club.)

I’ve been trying to figure out delivery for the final few boards since late October. A Thanksgiving snowstorm thwarted our first attempt, but it'll happen. When you’re on Loveless Time, everything takes five times longer than normal. We just roll with it.

Meantime, we’ll just step back to late-September, when the deck project first began, and recall one of the most glorious days of fall...

We covered the 75 miles up to Loveless with an extra light carbon footprint that day, arriving in a natural gas vehicle courtesy of CenterPoint Energy, where my former neighbor Doug works.

We turned quite a few heads with our moving billboard. Other than an extra-small trunk that couldn’t begin to hold our myriad of power tools, you’d never know it was anything other than a gas-gulping machine.

Chris and Doug are old hands at teaming up on projects. They put in the necessary brainwork to get the deck project started, figuring out the best way to cut and place deck boards and how to work with the Minnesota  pine, which was steam-cooked in a kiln imported from Finland. (We do love our stories at Loveless.) The wood, they said, seemed to splinter a bit more easily than cedar.

With peak fall colors and temps in the mid-70s, the boys installed about half a dozen boards in the front and back decks before we cooked burgers on the grill and called it a day.

It was toasty enough for shorts and bare shoulders.

Chris got back at it three weeks later, with all the glorious foliage down. He put in two long work days with only modest help from me. (I couldn’t seem to master the art of drilling the damn screws in straight.) Chris figures his injured hand is about 40 percent recovered, but he still worked like a maniac before running out of deck boards, which he was most careful to conserve.

What a disappointment to come so close.

Then again, look how far we’ve come!

October 18, 2010 preceeding the champagne christening.