It’s November. How did that happen? Fall in the Ozarks has peaked, and we are on the slow decrescendo to winter. We have had our first frost, though this week the afternoons have been warm enough to warrant shorts and tank tops. Most of the leaves on our property have fallen, and the forest floor is a mosaic of color.
We made a lot of progress on our wall tent deck this week. The project has taken much longer than we expected it to. Building a floating deck on a slope with deck blocks has proved incredibly tricky. We are building with green pressure-treated lumber, and much of it has been very warped. Because our posts can move, each board we add pulls others out of place. This has been frustrating, to say the least.
We finished notching and placing the posts on Saturday. We couldn’t have done it without our brothers! It was quite a task.
We were feeling pretty good at that point in the project. But when we starting putting up joists, we starting running into problems. Though we had checked meticulously to make sure we were square, we realized we were off — thanks mainly to the warped boards putting pressure on the posts at odd angles. Putting everything right involved a trip to Lowe’s and more wood to brace the posts.
At this point, we wish we would have just buried the posts with concrete. But after lots of struggle and bracing, we have our deck mostly framed. It looks great, and we don’t think we will have any more trouble with it.
As we say many weeks, we are trusting God with the pace of our project. Bonnie-Jean came down with the flu this week, so we were down a girl for several days. We are still staying in town with family while getting our winter camp set up, so the commute is taxing. But we are excited to be making the progress we have so far.
On a lighter note, our lumber pile has been invaded by at least one vole — we had to figure out what it was, as it seems too big to be a mouse but too small to be a rat. It’s very cute, and not too scared of people. We don’t see much of it when we have our dogs with us, but since we left them with my brother a couple days this week, we got to see the vole quite often.
HOMESTEAD SISSIES 