After the flurry, a slog

Here's the reference deckboard, as straight as we can make it. Once that was secure, I could use ½-inch spacers and a board-bender to keep everything parallel. I secure the boards with enough screws, and leave the rest til later--one evening I listened to an entire Giants game (from Colorado) until it became too dark to see....


Prefabricating the support assemblies made for nice bursts of progress.


Tom and Lindsey got their system down for mounting the supports, bolting them to the joist ends and blocking the bottoms to the beams for added security.



Alex helped me with some milling this past Saturday, and proved to be a good little worker.


Alex entertained the world with some excellent practice on his new instrument, thereby becoming the first person to "use" the deck.


Here's the scene as I left this past Sunday morning--still some cuts to make, but the layout mostly complete to within 4' of the edge.

Sunday, shorter but still very productive

After a great meal (!) and unexpected birthday cake for me (woo hoo) a bunch of folks hobbled off to bed and reconvened for more fun in the morning.


The bay tree limb that had been quasi-supporting the west side of the deck did have to be chainsawed out of there, revealing a spectacular rot-cavity that has no doubt weakened the entire tree. Yikes!


After a few odds and ends and some last milling, a small group began the jigsaw / sudoku task of cutting ranks of deck boards (verifying true straight line to start, making nottches for sills and downspouts, avoiding seam conflicts, and dealing with bowed boards).


This was taken from the balcony just before I left with Alex at 6 PM, and shows a bunch of deck boards not yet spaced and secured.

First day of the big weekend

Got up to Inverness after a brutally busy day of graduate student orientation / dog and pony show, and hitched a ride with Keith via his son's soccer game in Napa. Arrived to find that Muggs and John Liu had had a huge day milling, and my former student Bryan Jaeger had put in 4 hours after his schoolday had finished, demo'ing like a demon.

I'm too tired to add captions. Must sleep. [I added a few later]


Happy man and his Sawzall.


We arose Saturday to light drizzle or heavy mist, and still some old supports that had to go.


With the old joists cut away, the old posts could be levered down and put aside for salvaging.


Meanwhile all the usable deck boards had to be de-nailed and have the rotted cut blocks cut out, without damaging the surface too badly.


Bryan J was an absolute monster working on the ledger, sistering in boards where the Graveson crew had left gaps six years ago (when they had done some patching of joists too) and then securing the special joist hangers for the pressure-treated lumber.


The guy on the left is my old friend and workout buddy Keith, who traded in his usual fine cabinetmaking (Summit Woodworks) for a kick-ass day of framing.


Heaving the joists onto the frame was more good core work worthy of Pilates...


... and this shot from the third floor balcony shows the progress.


All the joists and blocks had to be nailed and toe-nailed, but Keith was in the flow for several hours....


as was the table saw team up on the badminton court, taking care not to overdrive the saw nor have the 18-foot boards bind up. Bravo Jim, Bryan M, Jeff Sharp, John Liu and later Will Stringfellow!


The last few blocks we did in tandem, which was kind of fun.


Meanwhile Tom and his wife Lindsey had been busy on the west side of the deck getting ready for the rail supports, which Tom had pre-fabbed earlier in the week.


This design is way stronger than the original, and keeps the same 15-degree angle that is so characteristic of this deck while adding much more structural integrity below.


After the rot had been cut out of both edges of each board, the planer peeled off the top face to reveal often gorgeous tight-grained redwood that you can't buy anymore.


When I saw this at the end of the day I got a little choked up.


When Bryan J had to leave I insisted on a group photo; Jacquie took this so she's not in it.

Wednesday--the fun continues

. . . beginning at 7:40 AM when the truck from Golden State beeped its way up the driveway (just was I was thinking to myself, "I'd better put some signage down at the foot of the lane").


The driver was quite deft, and I love the way the laws of inertia allowed him to bump the load off the rollers (back up the truck a couple of feet, hit the brakes hard, and drop the back half, then finish the drop). So here's 50-odd joists and about 5 ranks of redwood....


Ahh the pleasures of removing joist-hangers from the scabbed-in ledger:


But Tom will actually have secured some of those new joists, after he finishes fully securing the ledger that hadn't been well-executed by the last crew...



And for you demolition fans, yes, there'll still be some left for the weekend:

Midweek--more demo

After an untimely intrusion of Real Life (as in, J O B) on Monday I managed to snatch a two-day trip to the scene of the crime here, although it was "only" six hours of demolition / de-nailing / helping Muggs with the last beam and posts for the place where the replacement deck meets the existing one).


This is his clever method for walking up a 4 x 8 beam
almost into place before setting in the posts...


Sledgehammer therapy, free-weight workouts, repetitive stress--
Haunted House Fitness has it all.


Tomorrow is the humongous delivery (heatin' up the MasterCard!)
from Golden State Lumber, and here's what used to be the
badminton court but is now a milling station.

I'll try to take a few more pix tomorrow--will do more demo
and a couple of hours of production milling so there's material
to be placed this weekend....

Inverness Deck: Start of Final Week

So as I was driving back from Inverness today after a blitz of a day getting ready for the huge sequence of work on the 18th-19th and beyond, I thought, "Why e-mail photos when I can upload them to the blog I kept on the Tour this summer?" So here's a quick session, showing a bit of progress.


Muggs and I pulled a couple of boards last week
and milled them just to prove that it was worth doing
(and that we wouldn't have to buy $10,000+ worth of new lumber).



We'll be ripping rotten edges off, leaving several different widths.
Planing down to the 39mm mark on the Delta planer seems to be enough....


Getting the rails and cap off without shattering the wood took some patience...


But as you see there's scary amounts of rot.


I tried out my technique of using the Sawzall from underneath
to cut away the rotten douglas fir joists, leaving the pressure-treated
sistered joists from a cobbled "fix" of about 6 years ago.


De-nailing definitely is a chore, although I got faster at it.
Odd to see the open space--and odder still to feel how spongy
everything is.


Some of these are 18' or 20' long I believe. Not sure how they'll mill.
I hope to do some more soon, so we have enough
deck product to place at least some during the work weekend. More soon.

Century Ride on Tiny Roads --> Back to the US of A

What Julius and I did on Wednesday the 4th was one of the best rides of my life. Googlemaps this one: Rochefort-en-Valdaine-> la Begude-de-Mazenc-> Sallettes-> Soyans-> Saou-> Col de Lauzens-> Saillans-> St. Nazaire-en-Desert-> Col de Roustans-> LaMotte-> Col de Pre Guittard-> Bouvieres-> Crupies-> Vesc-> Dielefit-> la Begude-> Rochefort. 171 Km, about 107 miles.

Rolling in this country is so amazing--so much variety, so much terrain, and nothing too too hard or sustained. We worked it pretty well, with plenty of water breaks, stopping in Saillans at a bakery for a delicious whole wheat nut-and-chocolate bar thingie, a leisurely lunch in St Nazaire, and some well-traveled ZonePerfect bars toward the end of the day when we needed a little extra burst of energy.

I believe we had maybe ten miles of road total with lines marked on 'em, and even the wind cooperated:
headwinds in the morning which actually turned into tailwinds at the very end of the day, thank god, and no places where we were in the red zone, either of us. We had a slightly nasty bit of busy road below Dieulefit, and I got this big burst and led out for a hard pull, and just as I started to fade a little, Julius took over and I rode his back wheel and recovered.

As usual, the end of the ride was a mixture: looking forward to the swim at the end, but a strange sadness that the ride itself had to end. These interludes sustain my soul somehow--the connection to family, the shared workout, the sense that we are so fortunate to love doing these things together, and make the time to do so even with the logistical barriers we face. I've got to keep this in perspective and seize the opportunity, damn the airplane ticket prices and jetlag--life is too short not to do this.

That was the big J's first English century, and I think my fifth (but my first unsupported, which is kind of cool, not to have the infrastructure of an organized ride around you). To me this whole day was country riding at its best, with little traffic, not too baking heat, and headwinds in the morning that were still tailwinds in the afternoon. And even better, we weren't so wiped out that we couldn't do another 30 with Christine the next afternoon. Sweet.

[Crazy to be going 200mph on the ground with the power stanchions flipping past like a picket fence. Why can't we do this in California? I don't even want to think about how many miles of high-speed rail we could install of the price of just a month of these stupid wars we're fighting...]

So there you have it. I am finishing this on the plane, having had a pretty straightforward time of it getting into CDG (more breathtakingly modern and well-laid-out transit hubmanship, featuring a Big Board worthy of NORAD headquarters, truly demonstrating how cosmopolitan this International Airport truly was)(one of my dad's impatiences was with airports that insisted on calling themselves International when they had a couple of flights to Mexico or Canada, thank you Fresno or Reno) and schlepping over to Terminal 2A and an intimidating but decently moving American Airlines line (only half an hour to get through, then baggage and security, with the whole process from train to gate taking an hour total), all the time enjoying the fact that I was not traveling in a big group, and could talk or not talk to neighbors (lots of 'merican being spoken, always a bit jarring). I don't know whether you can tell from the photo, but the destinations go from Amsterdam and Brazzaville to Yemen and Zanzibar, practically.

My seatmate turns out to be a nice enough chap, Stanfoo junior-to-be who began with two weeks en famille and then had 5 weeks of railpassing including Czech and Sweden and Finland adventures, computer science major who writes for the satirical magazine and does standup, gadgeted to within an inch of his life but good company as well as respectful of space too. He'll be out at Chi-town, and I will still have 5 more hours to SFO, oog.

Biking in Another Corner of Provence

I'm not sure when I will get the chance to upload this (depends on whether I can successfully negotiate the French instructions on wifi in the airport I guess), but I'm typing as I sit (in first class, no less, thanks to my Eurail Pass) enjoying French rail infrastructure, having left the little house in the boonies at 6 AM--arrived at Valence TGV station at 7:03, grabbed the train at 7:13, and am blasting toward a direct stop at Paris Aeroport Charles de Gaulle in time for a noon flight. C'est la frickin' vie!

The time with Julius was truly medicine for the soul, even with a certain amount of adolescent combat as Emily and Clara (ages 14 and 16) battled ennui, clouds-that-thwarted-pool-time, lack of Internet connection, minimalist TV, and of course their parents' desire to see them doing anything except listen to their iPods / watch TV / eat. The house Julius and Christine had rented for the week was in a small community called Rochefort-en-Valdaine, outside Montelimar, surprisingly close to the sprawl of BricoDepots and Hypermarches, but with a true boonies feeling already. The place was a converted grange, unspectacularly comfortable, and had a nice pool, a couple of different outdoor areas to eat or sit around, with no preceptible neighbors and next to no noise beyond the cicadas, the wind, and the thunder.

To the east the countryside was Bike Heaven, without a doubt, with dozens of small roads and not too tough passes, very compact geography and villages interspersed with lavender fields, and thanks to Julius' ministrations the bike I was riding was much more comfortable: a new saddle (the previous one having earned the epithet "un tortue" from Marco the bike store guy) and new tires and slightly bigger toe clips. What all this meant was the ability to roll effortlessly for mile after mile, getting to know the slightly funky shifting on the old and clattery derailleurs--luckily Julius had switched the 42 ring for a 39 so I didn't die on the hills, which in any event were seemingly less intense than what I had done in the past.

Each day we mixed some riding with either lounging and swimming and a bit of sightseeing (in addition to an expedition into Industrial Montelimar Monday morning to confirm with the Toyota dealer that the Previa would survive another trip to Brussels as long as Julius topped up the lubricant for the differential). We mixed slightly hammering rides with more leisurely ones with Christine, who has made tremendous progress as a road rider even since last year--this is a person who barely exercised when she first met J, and now can knock out 30-40 K rides with a good attitude almost all the time. Go Chris!