The New Deck

As part of our recent spate of home improvement projects, we decided to put in a new deck. I mentioned that I was looking forward to having a go at building it myself but, in hindsight, I am very,  very glad I didn't. There is absolutely no way, even without considering the other projects and day-to-day side-tasks that needed to get done, that I would even be close to finishing it. I would have been in over my head right from the start.

The end result of my recognizing my limits before I hit them (for once :) ) was that the family was able to enjoy a nice cookout on Memorial Day in comfort and style instead of avoiding a nightmarishly slapped-together contraption made of equal parts lumber, tears, and incompetence.

We got a couple of books on decks from Lowe's and drew up a fairly good sketch of how we pictured the end product.  Nothing too fancy, but we just wanted the broad strokes in place so we could have some cost benchmark to go on once we started interviewing contractors.

As luck would have it a home show was in the area about this time so we went to talk to the deck company hawking their wares there and to get ideas for other improvements we could make.

Man...  This dude would not shut up about the benefits of composite lumber. Literally. I asked him, like, 3/4 of a question and that set him off on a filibuster extolling the virtues of this and that and the other. I managed to finish up asking my question while he took a few seconds to get a sample book (and presumably to slam a couple more Red Bulls and hyperventilate on pure oxygen), but this only set him off again. Once he finally wound down I was able to get a rough estimate of the cost of our proposed deck, which turned out to be about 125% above what my neighbor and I figured for materials.

The next guy visited the house and surveyed the property while I was dismantling the old garden and the while wife and the boy went to take care of stuff in town. He spent about an hour measuring things and drawing up a rough sketch of his vision for the deck on a sheet of legal pad.  I met him up on the porch when he ordered me to "take uh break and come'n' see what I got forya".

When I say "rough sketch" I mean almost comically so, but you could see he was either 1) genuinely proud of it or 2) ashamed of it but acted like he was proud of it because he is a typical salesperson scumbag.  I couldn't tell which.

Giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming he was just providing an overview so we could hash out talking points, I asked how long it would take to get a quote. He said "I can give you a quote right now, but I gotta tell ya, May is lookin to be a busy month for me so if you want this deck built, I have to know now."  "Well, regardless of the number you give us I will still need to talk it over with my wife," I say. He replies "I was wonderin why she was leaving when I got here.  Hmph... I thought we'd be able to do business today."

After that uncomfortable exchange I started looking through his sample book (in his defense the photos looked pretty good) while asking him about his company's policies on a few topics. To sum up, the following came to light:
1) He lamented that he has problems with his crew standing around and doing nothing unless someone is there to tell them what to do.
2) He won't try to make sure that nails and screws are cleaned up because "you never find them all anyway".  Obviously, this would be bad for my kid.
3) There is no such thing as a construction crew that is professional enough not to curse around two-year-olds. "Even the Amish swear in German" he tells me. I answered back with stunned silence.
4) He hadn't considered renting a port-a-potty for his crew, "since the woods were right there".
5) He won't leave his Tom-Cullen-esque sketch because he is afraid that I would use it as a blueprint with which to design my own deck so he is taking it with him so as he put it - and I'm not joking here - "to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands".

His quote was a little less than that of over-eager home show guy's, FWIW.

The last guy was courteous, non-pushy, and professional.  He drew up a detailed plan of the deck which we were allowed to keep.  He did not try to wow me with a story of his gang of hard-to-manage, foul-mouthed, sharp-object dropping, high-priced clowns that would have spent most of their time standing around and pooping behind my shed. Plus his estimate was only 50% above cost.

Awesome. Get to work, sir, if you please.

Not only did this guy's team will this deck into existence in the shockingly short timeframe he quoted, the work area was extremely clean the whole time.  He even replaced two outlets on the outside of the house with ones that were better quality - for free - because "the electrical guy was there anyway", he said.

I write this as I am out there now cooking chicken and corn for my family. It is 80+ degrees, but I am in the shade and the breeze is blowing real nice-like.

And, to put the icing on the cake, I found a buyer in the Russian Mafia who will pay top ruble for cartoonishly bad deck plans that will somehow play a key role in their takeover of the Eastern Seaboard later this summer.

"The wrong hands..."  Give me a break.