Building the Deck (part 2)

by Donna Schoenkopf

My sister Annemarie arrived on a Friday night, late. She drove up from Dallas, a four hour ride, through a full-moon-lit countryside , along a two lane highway, up and down hills, with at least twenty miles between tiny towns, and got to my house about nine o’clock with a car full of tools ... TWO power saws, an electric drill, a card table, a great ruler/square gizmo, tape measure, etc. etc.

I had a good bottle of scotch waiting for her.

Unpack the car. Pour that scotch. Sit down and laugh.

What the HELL were we doing??

Well, Annie knew what we were doing. She is a master of planning and engineering. She has built many things out of wood, including a really cool headboard for her bed which has a fold-down panel for her dinner tray and another for her writing pad. She can write and eat and watch teevee all at once.

She is a great multitasker.

So we drank enough to feel happy, and off to bed.

Anyone who stays at my house knows that you don’t get a real, separate bedroom here. It is like camping. You get an AREA to sleep in. I have no walls, except around my bathroom.

That means at 5 am the cats will start annoying you for their breakfast. I will be using the toilet. The lights will go on.

Day WILL begin.

But Annie can sleep through almost anything.

That morning the most incredible sunrise happened out the eastern sliding glass doors. INTENSE red-orange. HIGH up into the sky. The leafless branches spiked through the color.

But did I wake Annie up?

No.

She thanked me later when I told her.

We breakfasted, eggs “over easy,” my version, just cover the pan!, coffee still not perfected for my percolater, OJ and toast.

Then we hoisted ourselves up and went outside to the giant pile of lumber.

I had done NOTHING to prepare ANYTHING for this project.

Guilt.

I looked at the crap still in front of the back door:

... some broken slabs of mortared bricks I had put next to the door to step on during muddy times, which is a LOT of the time.

AND

... the scrap lumber I had laid at the "front door" for a semblance of a porch ... lumber that was split, some pressed board I had rescued from the garbage can of a Tecumseh citizen. It had eventually (after about a month) begun to disintegrate into formaldehyde-treated wood powder. Puppy Diego had helped it along by stripping the fake laminate off of it. I think he ate it.

We pulled away the bricks from the back door and discovered that we couldn’t just replace them with a deck.

No.

We would have to dig.

Well, it hasn’t rained here in a long while (for Oklahoma, anyway) and the clay was as hard as cement and the gravel which Peewee had left as a kind of safe place to step on was also as hard as cement. The gravel concretizes itself with the powder of the rock dust and when it’s been dry for a while, the gravel is really, really, hard.

But dig we must.

I got my shovels, a tiny one, just my size, and the big one Annie bought to dig a hole for Miss Marples, her beloved cat, whom she buried here at Chigger Lake. Could barely make a dent. Got the pitchfork. That was pretty good. We took turns jamming the thing into the earth, which loosened it a little, and then the other of us would turn the dirt. We went down about four or five inches, I would say. We would measure and level and sweat (and it was a COLD day!) and curse under our breaths.

It was by far the hardest part of the whole operation.

We dug an eight by eight foot square. It took HOURS.

But we did it!!!

Then we (or shall I say, Annie,) began the cutting of the lumber. It was VERY exciting. She had decided we would miter the corners, which makes the frame really strong. We had to adjust the saw a bunch of times, but, voilà! CUT BOARDS.

Annie showed me how to drill, which took a long time. I am a klutz. She was patient. I was mortified. I mean, how hard can it be to screw in screws? But my drill kept coming off the screw head and Annie would watch and tell me what the problem was.

EVENTUALLY, I got the hang of it and topped the frame, ALL BY MYSELF, with the walking boards.

It was absolutely beautiful. For the first time I had a lovely structure, outside my back door, that would keep my feet mud-free, and would be bedecked with potted plants and (maybe) framed by bamboo on one side to hide my air conditioner.

Puppy Diego loved it. He lay on it, sniffed it, licked it. CheGuevara, the kitten (no longer), liked it too. He sat, sphynx-like and watched Diego lick. Rosie the Cat hid somewhere.

Annie and I stood on it and smiled and felt proud.

That was a muthah.

But did we stop? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!

We started right away on the western deck, two 8 X 8 frames, which COULD be laid directly on the ground without digging. Actually, not directly on the ground. We would put bricks at all the corners, for which I scraped some dirt away, just to give it a little solidity.

Sawsawsaw. Drilldrilldrill. Levellevelevel. Bingo! Frame #2 was done in no time! (Comparatively speaking.) We laid boards on top of the frame just to see how it looked. And walked on it and congratulated ourselves.

By now we were so tired, we could barely see, so we stumbled indoors. It was about 4:00 pm. And we had guests coming.

It was Annie’s birthday that week, so I had made a crockpot dinner and bought some wine and invited sister-in-law Lynn, and friend Rosalynn. Annie likes them both. We had a glass of wine (I had a martini), and I talked about LSD connecting me to the universe in the 1960s (oh, those martinis!), and we had dinner and chocolate cake and ice cream and laughed and enjoyed each others’ company, then “Good night! Good night!” and we fell into bed ... exhausted.

Next morning, breakfast again, still got the coffee wrong, and started all over again. Finished all NINE of the 8 X 8 frames ... one out the back door, two out the west door, and SIX out the south doors. Wow.

At the end of the day, Annie brought a couple of chairs up onto an almost-finished portion of the deck, on which we had just laid the top boards, no screws yet. We poured ourselves a glass of red. We watched the sunset. It was fabulous.

Not too much time later, Annie had to leave. I told her I would figure out how to level the frames and top them myself. She packed up her clothes and tools and off she went.

I watched her car drive down the curving driveway out of sight.

Annie must have had her mind chewing on the project. She called me later to tell me she would be back. She had thought of a great way to do the rest of the leveling. She was coming BACK.

So the next week she took off work and showed up on Thursday night.

I cannot tell you how happy I was to see her. She makes things seem like they are all going to turn out right. And she is a stickler on doing it the way it should be done.

We drank some scotch, went to bed, and started all over again the next morning. Breakfast and a survey of the yard.

Then she began the process of leveling.

This is how you do it:

First you get a piece of 2x4, a foot or so long, and clamp it to the side of the frame. Then you put the level on the frame. My job is to watch the level. Annie pounds the 2x4 into the ground until, now this is the magic part, the whole thing is level. I swear to God, it works. I do not know how she thought of it, but it works!!!

Then she cuts legs for the decks in the proper length. I put the clamps on the frames and take them off when Annie gets the frame level. I drag the wood to the saw table. We both lift the frames into place on the ground. I make sure rulers are on the saw table and drill the holes for the screws and Anne screws the feet on.

At the end of the day, the frames of the decks were done.

What a team.

We completed the whole project in two weekends. Actually, about three and a half days.

She took her tired body home on Saturday, leaving me with the very easy and enjoyable job of screwing in the top boards to the frame.

I thought it would be a really tiring and physically painful job, but it’s not. I lay the boards on the frame with the grain down. (Thanks, Jo.) I drill the holes, seven per board. I screw in the screws.

It is extremely pleasant. Very meditative. The air is clean and crisp. The boards are beautiful. Like snowflakes, they are all different. As I finish each frame, the satisfaction I feel is immense. I walk on each one that I finish. Diego and Che join me. We stand on the deck and look around ... down the hill to the pond ... to the east woods ... then to the setting western sun, making long shadows across the deck.

The light is beautiful.

I step inside and look out at my beautiful deck. The sun makes the boards glow. I get a glass of red wine. I go back outside and sit down on the chair Annie dragged up.

And watch the sun go down.

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