The porch that never was!

I thought I should take a moment and give you an update on the never ending porch project.  It's going, but it's going slow.  It's been painfully hot here and it's hard to go outside and work when it's 100 degrees at 7 p.m.  WITH Missouri humidity.  I find that even on coolish days, I have to stand in the shade if it's not imperative that I'm needed.  I've always been this way - no worries. 

If I'm hot, I look like I'm about to stroke out.  So if you see me beet faced, just say hello and move on. I'm not stroking out (yet).

This, my friend, is what $2,000 looks like.  Well, most of $2k there were a few more stacks later.  That's $800 more than when we shingled it 5 years ago.  Hmmfpt.  Next shingling job will be done by a bunch of illegals trucked in after a hail storm.  We're NOT doing it again.

It was hot, but we managed to get the last section up on the 4th.  There was a lot of cussing as we realized some of our 4x4's had twisted.  Effing treated lumber.  It's a pain to work with.

It doesn't look like a lot more, but here you can see all the support ceiling joists are up.  That was an all day project.  Gene did most of the hard stuff.  This was a "stand in the shade" kind of day. :/

Work was slow so they sent Gene home 3 hours early.  No, he's not very happy about it either.  He came home and cut the tops off of the posts on the front and put in joist hangers.  Joist hangers are the metal brackets that support the weight of the joists.  They also help the joist to not twist.  If you're building a deck, for safety reasons, you really should have joist hangers.  You don't want to have a party with 40 of your closet friends and have your deck collapse.  YIKES.   Even though it's not required for the short width of the deck (8 feet) we are still adding extra support joists down the center to help keep the lumber straight and keep it from twisting.

Boo kitty says "heyyyyyyy girlfriend".

You can see the tops of the posts are gone now.  YAY.  I hated those up there.  They looked raggedy and hodge podge like we didn't know what we're doing.

We don't know what we're doing but no need to announce it or anything.

You can see better from here that all the joists are installed in the floor.  That was a big project. We found out that since we're running our decking diagonally, we have to put our joists closer together.  This means more wood.  The place we've been buying wood was out of what we needed, this is when we realized that there was WAY BETTER wood at another lumber yard (Bearcat Lumber fyi) for about .06 more. 

*heavy sighs*

Live and learn.

Every project we do has been a learning process for us.   I'm sure it's not 100% perfect (I know it's not!) but what I do know is that whe it's done, it will look nice and will add value to our home.  If it means that it's only 89% as good as it should be, then I say a B+ is still pretty damn good and I'll take it.

Can I hear a "hell yeah" for a B+?