Deck

We're building a deck. Well, really what we're doing is paying someone to build a deck. It's turned out to be a much longer process than we'd planned. After months of talking about it, a month of confusion, and a month of working with a contractor, we were all ready to go. The deck building began!!

We had concrete steps in the grass going up the side hill, as well as a small concrete path and steps to the house. To save money, we decided to do the demolition ourselves, with the help of our neighbors' sledgehammer and jack hammer.

Here's the hill where the steps were in the grass. The steps into the back door were actually covering the original steps, which we had to leave for the contractor to pull out.

You would think that this picture was taken just a few days later. It wasn't...we hit a bump in the road. Apparently the City of Greenville has a 7-14 (business!) day waiting period from when you apply for the building permit to when it is issued. So the project was put on hold for over 2 weeks. We had hoped to have the deck completed by Caroline's birthday, but that didn't happen. I took this picture today. Fortunately the building permit has been issued and the contractor returns tomorrow!

Since I tore up the steps, we had no way to get in and out of the back door, so the contractor made some temporary steps for us. Not the safest set of steps in the world, but they've held up better than we thought they would. Also...notice the nice new window box? Complements of Catherine and Christopher Austin and installed by Jerry East. At least something on the back of the house looks good!