Deckstravaganza: Tonight, we build!

Tonight was the first night of building! You heard me - demo is over! While I'm sad my time communing with sledgehammers is through, we stand at the threshold of greatness.

Behold, the pile that will become the deck:

OK, our evening began consulting the best deck building book the Des Moines Public Library has to offer.

Sideways why now, Blogger?

Our goal for the night was to measure where our footings will go (hubs and his old roomie will be augering tomorrow while I hobnob it up at an awards dinner). We started by putting some screws in the house.

Then, we tied some string to some sticks and some more string to more sticks and measured and leveled and centered.
Why did we do this? You know, I'm not entirely sure, except that the almighty deck book told us this was the way to go. Hubs understood, but frankly - ever since my fourth grade teacher decided to skip the math curriculum and do theatrical poetry readings instead, I've been a little fuzzy on these types of things.
I held the plumb bob at the cross of the two strings so we'd know exactly, precisely, for sure where the center of the footings would be. It was maybe a little tedious.
But, it's OK because check out the magnificent end result!

Oh, you don't see our bamboo skewers shoved into the ground at the exact right spot?
We also realized we hadn't jack hammered far enough over. Luckily, we had brute strength on our side. Action shot!
So, three hours later, we had post markers, all set and ready to be augered. Then, we had Jimmy Johns and homebrews. Deck building is rough, rough business.