The never ending project

Daniel Kahneman on happiness

I made Claire watch this video tonight. She only made me pause it once to watch the food network, but also asked that we finish it after she saw who won the show she was interested in. If you don't already know about it, TED is a resource online in which different experts produce interesting lectures that you can watch for free. Tip: don't start watching videos on TED unless you have several hours to kill.

This video is particularly interesting to anyone over 25 as you naturally start to evaluate whether you're spending your most precious resource wisely. I'm by no means over the hill, I haven't even seen my billionth second, but I think it's important to remember that any day could be the last.

At around the same time the Sax family welcomed it's newest member my little nephew Jakob, one of it's eldest, Kathy Sax (this family has a thing with K's) said goodbye. The recent death of my great aunt Kathy reminded me for the umpteenth time that our mortality is the opposite of infinity. It reminded me most of the year after we lost my dad to cancer, when doctors told me I had a calcium deposit that could just as easily have turned out to be testicular cancer. There's nothing quite like looking death in the face to get you thinking about how you're living you're life.

So it's interesting to think about happiness, and how we might maximize it for ourselves and our loved-ones. This is not so straightforward as it seems at first glance. So you go and do the thing or things that it was important you always do. Now what? This is where the long-term goals of the remembering self come in, and where projects end up getting prioritized and maybe eventually completed.

Once kids are brought into the mix the equation begins to change, radically. JorEl said it best I think:

You will travel far, my little Kal-El. But we will never leave you... even in the face of our death. The richness of our lives shall be yours. All that I have, all that I've learned, everything I feel... all this, and more, I bequeath you, my son. You will carry me inside you, all the days of your life. You will make my strength your own, and see my life through your eyes, as your life will be seen through mine. The son becomes the father, and the father the son. This is all I can send you, Kal-El.

I was particularly terrified one day after Claire told me she was pregnant, when I realized that I had not yet gotten life insurance, and here I was in what had seemed like a perfectly acceptable risk-reward scenario - freeway traffic in Northern Virginia. Suddenly the risk had become overwhelming, because I was no longer the sole consumer of my own life's experiences. Life insurance is great for alleviating this paralyzing feeling. Term life has the most bang for the buck.

Back to happiness. When I imagined myself as an adult, I imagined the kind of guy capable of building things. When we bought this house, I looked at the poorly constructed deck bolted through the siding, and I said, "I can build a better one."

There's lots of things going on in and around this picture. There were a lot of things that made the old deck dangerous. And it was obvious from our cursory inspection of the structure that it hadn't been seen by a building inspector. This picture sealed the deal and got us a 10K $ deal on settlement costs.

The original aluminum siding of the house was compromised by lag bolts from these rim joists. In order to replace it, we'd have to tear the old deck down. That's what we did in 2008. During this part of the project, our AC compressor exploded in an unrelated HVAC failure. We discovered that our natural gas fired heat exchanger was rusted and was letting flue gasses into our house. Luckily the hole in the roof, the drafty sliding doors, and the old aluminum siding was letting enough CO out that it never set off our detector.

It would be 2 years before we had our savings back to the point where we could think about building a deck again, and that process started while it was still springtime. Recently, it was completed, and we passed our final inspection this week!

This is actually a picture from over a week ago, since then I trimmed the balusters flush and added a 2x6 railing.

This picture is the ultimate expression of the conflict between the experiencing self and the remembering self. The things that stand out in my memory of this project are not the endless days of heat and sweat - I think there's a small dry spot on the shirt in this picture:

Well to some extent they do, with pictures like these:

What stands out are the things I got to do when I learned something, and the people nice enough to help that I got to share the experience with. I've lost track of how many people have come out to lend a hand over the last two years. My sister in law helped steady a couple of posts so I could bolt them in place, and my brother helped me lift the remaining 12 footers into place. Several of my friends helped demolish the old deck, including people who I don't even know any more. I think it's probably better not to try to list out credits, I wouldn't want to forget anyone, but my biggest help was Marc, so we'll christen our new deck "Mount Augustine."

The remembering self won out, as now I get to remember different aspects of days gone by and people otherwise forgotten, as I point out different features or small errors and tell their stories. Here's a few random pictures to show some of these bits so I can brag to people more easily.

This picture shows several things, my posts come up out of the decking - sandwiched between two joists- instead of being stuck onto the side. Also Claire had many chances to help, and of course, Marc's fast-work ethic helped us bang this thing out from frame to finish in just a couple of days. Using 2x4's and 4x4's for spacing was great because it meant even spacing and followed building codes.

Here's the end result:

Here's the last shot of the frame without any decking - this shows our flashing, trusses, headers, diagonal reinforcement, bridges, and the cement mixer that Marc let me borrow - more than once!

Marc turned me on to DBT1Z's, which make the surface of the deck a clean, splinter-free proposition. It turns out they are extremely hard to find. Finally at almost 9pm we found the last 3 boxes we needed at a home depot in falls church.

Here's one of the boxes coming out of the ground to form concrete around our 3 outer posts. This deck is freestanding (which is safer) and needed a little more stiffness, which you don't get so much from the new style out-of-ground bolted hardware. 600 pounds of concrete 16x16 goes down 2 feet, and comes up 16 inches out of the ground with 8 pieces of rebar. I also cast in place a drainage tube of 2 inch PVC pipe so the post won't rot and the hardware won't rust. We're planning to put some kind of stone around these boxes and maybe put planters on top.

Finally I used my router to put a "roman" curve on either side of the rails, which gives you something to grab onto and puts a little extra detail where there's usually just a 2x6. My old battery powered rotozip couldn't take the heat on this one, and the motor caught fire, so I had an excuse to get a new RZ10 and add a huge amount of sawdust to the equation.

This post is getting ridiculously long, and there's so much more I could write and more funny pictures I could post, but after all, it's just a deck. Now I can get back to work on my boat.