Nearing the finish line, really

I spent way too much time in the cramped and dark downstairs of the Big House, milling stair treads and pickets.  With these short lengths I was able to reclaim almost all of the old boards we salvaged from the previous deck, and I also cleaned out a bunch of short lengths from the other deck, that I could not bring myself to throw away.  There's not a lot of use for 30" pieces of redwood, but then when it's almost $5 a foot (if you could buy it--the new stuff is much less dense and tightly grained), it's sort of like tossing out $10 bills.  No, I can't.

So I emerged this afternoon to find Muggs blasting away on the lower stairs and railings--he's got special cloth over the landing, ready to add it below the joists to help keep the weeds down.  I neglected to get a photo of the wild-cucumber vine that had started coming up underneath the plywood that had been covering the landing for weeks--this is our answer to Kudzo, I guess--I took a half hour the other morning and yanked at least a cubic yard of the stuff off of our thimbleberry and blackberry, where it had happily blanketed the bushes...

With clear-enough weather I was able to finish the top of the slats and the top of the stairs (minus the newel post detail).  You can see (despite the blurry pic) that the angles and planes all work out right enough, something we had not completely visualized beforehand, but had let our subconscious work on it long enough.  I still have to trim off the right-hand top rail to match the left-hand one.  That left post is new, since we decided on symmetrical post heights with chamfered tops, and thus had to re-seat a new one (complete with notches along the stair stringer to accommodate the bolt-heads for the Simpson hardware).

Here's the completed field of rail slats--it's tighter or less airy than on the Big House deck, but I varied the spacing so I hope the effect is not too blocky or wall-like.

And here's the view from below, this evening, showing where we are--pickets and stair treads are the two big items left (trimming the rail caps doesn't count).  This photo shows the 2 x 8 pressure-treated side board that Muggs added in the afternoon to protect the stair stringer and redwood posts from dirt--if there is a planter put in, its edge can be attached to this buffer board, with the idea being that the more air flow / less ground-to-wood contact there is, the longer this deck will last.

Now that there is a lower stair post, I can re-install the list switch I removed in the demo phase, and (I hope) figure out the wiring for the outdoor lighting.  The more I look at this, the more stoked I am about the way this is turning out.