Big Casualty!

You should note, the pictures at right might be a bit graphic for squeamish folks when enlarged - you've been warned. And yes, that is "bits of me" on the router and guide. Told you it was nasty!

I've been hurt lots of times doing home improvement projects. This one, though, takes the cake (I hope)! I was building an arbor with 4x4 cedar posts and cedar lattice work. The posts needed a channel cut in them to hold the lattice sheets in place. A router was required to cut out those channels. About my third post in, the router slipped in my hand as I was picking it up and I inadvertently hit the power rocker-switch which, of course, turned the router on. Since I wasn't ready for it, the router then torqued out of my hand, spun around and fell to the ground.

I was fairly certain it did not hit my legs or feet on the way down but I was less certain about my hands. Upon closer inspection, it was immediately evident that the router "got me." Off to the emergency room we went. According to the wife, I was frighteningly calm. Until the pain, cold-sweats and nausea kicked in anyway. As it turns out, for a guy who took out a chunk of his hand with a 3/4" router bit set 3/4" deep, I was extraordinarily lucky that I did not hit any bones, tendons, muscles, ligaments, nerves, or arteries. Wouldn't a lucky guy have not gotten "bit" by the router at all, though?

Composite deck

New home, new backyard relaxing place. This time, it's a deck.

Trips to Home Improvement Centers: 15

It's been a while since we undertook a project of this magnitude but a 5' drop out the back door mandated we get on this project pretty quick. Building a multi-level deck is challenging enough let alone having to work within the confines of incorporating a hot tub on a cement slab.

Weeks worth of post-hole digging, months of substructure building and back-ordered materials waiting.

It was all worth it in the end, though!

The last photo is obviously the finished product and was taken a summer later. The skirt did not go on the first summer-it was an addition the second summer.

Priorities

Who needs grass when you have a hot tub? It's a bit pathetic looking, but until we get the deck built, this is the view of the hot tub from our back door. You can tell what our priorities are, huh?

Under roof

The new house is really coming together - and it is looking huge. I think we have risen to a new level of Broke Homeowners. Here are some more pictures - these first two are from the back-ish and show the house wrapped in Tyvek.










The last couple are from the front-ish and the last picture shows the house with some brick and under roof with shingles and everything!










In some of the pictures, you can see a couple of fairly mature maple trees. We planted seven maples before the foundation was even completed. When you live in a neighborhood with no trees, you gotta take every chance you get to get a hard start on tree growth!

The first walls are up!

Look - a foundation!
















And some walls!
















And some more walls!
















And so continues "house rich, cash poor."

We're moving!

That's right - after seven years of improvements, additions, modifications, and landscaping maturing, it's time to move on. This family of four has used every available inch of the current tri-level house and is looking to spread our wings a bit with a little more space both inside and out.

As you can see from the shots below, it's going to be quite a step up from our present postage-stamp-sized yard. That has us both excited and nervous. Right now, it's just a lot with some piles of dirt, sand, and gravel.
More to come...

Hot tub pergola

We love our hot tub. One of the really nice things about having your own hot tub is you can go au natural if you'd like. It's OK, you can admit it. Of course, with a 1/4 acre lot, privacy can be difficult to come by. So, we built this pergola to screen the hot tub from the neighbors. It really was a pretty quick project - just a couple of evenings during one week.


Some people have asked for some more detail on how I built the privacy frames. There wasn't really much magic to it - I just routed a channel in the cedar 2x4s to seat the lattice in - the picture below shows this pretty well.

Now the only "full moon" the neighbors see is the celestial body in the sky.