5/29/07 Deck Party

Welcome back Quirky readers! Hope your Memorial Day weekend was fan-tablous! You will no doubt be thrilled to know that two of my personal goals were accomplished this weekend! The first one was that I managed to visit Lowes on 4 consecutive days, and the other was that according to the official quirk-o-meter, 100 brand new victims visitors found the website in the month of May. Annnnnd at least some of them returned, which tells me that there are either a lot of people with their own secret dash of quirkiness, or they're all just masochists looking for a new way to torture themselves. Either way, welcome to Quirky!

Anyway, back to the Lowes thing. Because I am a freak of nature intriguingly quirky, I (unlike the rest of my gender) despise shoe shopping or clothes shopping. I buy shoes and clothes because they won't let me into work or restaurants without them. Instead, the store that makes my heart go pitty-pat is Lowes (or Home Depot, but I'll go to Lowes first just because I can get into the parking lot without having to wait in a turn lane). A day in Lowes is a happy day indeed. They have everything a girl could ever want in there! Garden stuff, power tools, closet organizers, paint...the list goes on and on. Nary a weekend goes by without at least one visit. But this weekend, we hit the Lowes mother load. Tony and I went on Friday night, then again on Saturday, then again on Sunday, and then again on Monday! 4 days of Lowes! You can't beat that short of just moving in and living there. (Which I've considered, by the way). The reason for all of this home improvement shopping is my brand new deck. I've been planning this new deck for a while because Tony and I just need more room outdoors to throw our big neighborhood cookout parties. (Haha! Just kidding! Tony and I are anti-social hermits. We would never throw a party! We couldn't pick most of our neighbors out of a lineup). But now that we have a deck, maybe we could start throwing parties...small parties...maybe.

I really am proud of my new deck. It was easier to build than I thought it would be, and waaaaaay easier than Tony thought. He was predicting deck-building doom for most of the first day. (He's not good at imagining things spatially, bless his heart. He's so lucky I'm around). On Friday night we scouted for our supplies. On Saturday we bought our supplies and sunk the posts. On Sunday we bought more supplies and built the frame and hung the joists, and on Monday we bought even more supplies, attached the railing posts and laid the floorboards. Viola! Instant deck. With the exception of smacking my own thumb with the hammer once (ooooooh that hurts!) and the post hole that we dug straight through a very large, very angry colony of ants, (bringing the war to their turf this time), everything went quite well. If you're looking for a good step-by-step deck building tutorial, complete with tables that tell you how far your joists should be if you use this size wood vs that size and what length bolts you need to attach everything with, I recommend Ace Hardware's website. (Lowes has a deck building program too, but I didn't like it. The materials list told me that I needed to buy two 4x4x16 posts for a 10x10 deck. There's just something fishy about that).

So that was my weekend. A new deck and 100 new people to read about it. I'll post a picture and we'll all have a virtual cookout in cyberspace. Everyone's invited! This new deck is party central already!