I Didn't Post This Morning...

...because I was flying one of these

And now you're asking who would be dumb enough to give me the controls to one of these things? Well, that would be these folks. You see my lovely wife gave me one of their discovery flights for our wedding anniversary and they were obligated.

Speaking of gifts, I couldn't let her give me something really cool without outdoing her. So I bought her a new patio set for mothers day. (I love the Home Depot. Don't get me wrong here either, I'm not talking about the superficial love a teeney-bopper feels for the latest boy band here. I'm talking about a real deep manly kind of love. I'd sleep there if they'd quit kicking me out.)

It had to be sourced and assembled which is one of the reasons for light blogging last week. Have you ever tried to load a patio set into a jeep? It doesn't work very well. Thank God for tie-straps and a removable roof.

There was a problem however. Getting the set put together and onto the deck caused me to take a long hard look at the deck. You see, the chair and table legs are only 1/2 of an inch thick. The gap between the floor borads on the deck was 3/4 of an inch thick. That meant that if you would move your chair you would literally fall between the cracks with an easy 1/4 of an inch to spare. I found that out the hard way.

I also started to notice all of the rot that was taking place.

This shit needed to be fixed. So much for a realxing weekend. But really, who cares about that when it gives me another excuse to go to the Home Depot. Let the reconstruction begin.

Now, we should mention here that contrary to MoonBat belief, conservitives DO believe in recycling. The plan was to use as much of the old material as possible.

As such, a 3/4" gap becomes a 1/4" gap.

If you ever have the chance to spend a day pulling up old boards, banging out the old nails and then resecuring them closer together I suggest that you laugh in the face of whoever is giving you that chance. What a pain in the ass. As many of you know, I'm a consultant. What you don't know is that I bill out at $500.00/day. Lets do the math on the floor boards: Pulling up the old boards was easy and took only an hour. That's 10% of an average day and equates to $50.00. As that work would have been done anyway we're going to remove that money from the calculation. Now we're at $450.00 for the day. Placing and nailing the boards back ito their new positions took about 3.5 hours. Nope, wait, I was drinking beer at the time. Lets say 4 hours. That equals approximately $202.50 worth of my time and, seeing that it also would have had to be done anyway, we'll remove that from the total as well. That leaves us with the cost of pulling the nails out of the old boards. That cost was $247.50. Lets divide that by the 28 boards that got re-used: $247.50/28= $8.83. It cost me $8.83 for each recycled floor-board. The manly Home Depot stotre would have sold me new boards at a cost of $4.25 each or $119.00 for all 28. Here's the point: Recycling cost me over a hundred bucks and took 5 hours of my life that I'll never get back again. I'm beginning to think it's a little over-rated. Friggin Hippies!

Anyway, long story short, I got it done. The rot is gone and there was a grand total of 15" worth of gap taken out of the floor. It still needs to be stained but that's a project for another weekend. WOOHOO! I'm pleased to say that I didn't build this deck and that the idiot who did should be kicked in the box. How on earth can you be 2" out of square on a run of only 12 feet. Dumbass!

Needless to say, this is what kept me from posting this past weekend.

Now, we can only hope that the lovely Mrs. Evans takes this game a little further and outdoes me on fathers day. Honey if you're reading this we could really use one of these to go on the newly refurbished deck next to the new patio furniture.