January 6th…
Thoughts…
…
Let’s see… the day…
So! Finally, after having been on the Haven Hill family to-do list for years, at this point, I think, we finally got the deck braced and supported. There is still one more set of boards that need to be put in, but the deck is now resting on the supports instead of sagging. 🥳
That was the big accomplishment of the day, but that wasn’t the first thing that happened, so I guess I’ll go back and start from the beginning of the day like usual.
Once again, I didn’t get my morning routine in pretty much at all other than family gospel study with my mom. Still struggling with that. Maybe I’ll be successful come Monday morning.
After morning study with my mom and breakfast and what not, I headed out to spider Creek road Southeast of gateway to check out a 25 acre piece of property with a dilapidated house on it.
The house itself probably could have been salvageable, except they didn’t put in a real foundation. They treated it like a shed, with maybe one or two little footings, but mostly it was just sitting up on blocks.
Basically it was just three little tiny homes attached to each other, each on a different level, going up the hillside.
And there was a 400 foot elevation game from the front of the property to the back of the property. It’s fun to have the elevation game, but that makes most of the property a lot less useful. I don’t think the bank realizes what the deal really is with the house out there.
Maybe they do. Maybe they don’t. The realtor told me that They likely would be willing to take $70,000 less than they were asking, but I don’t know that it would even really be worth it for me then. I’d have to figure out how to monetize the property. If you can monetize, then great. I don’t really want to buy anything unless there is a reasonable means of monetization for the future. I could put a tiny home on it, and rent it out as an out of the way vacation spot, but the creek is not a year-round creek, so that makes it a bit less desirable.
Anyway, I probably shouldn’t go for it. It’s a ways out there and would be a heck of a lot of work and a bit of a risk.
Too bad…
After that, I came home to meet Jim to start working on the deck to try and raise it up and support it, but he was still in his CES meeting as a seminary teacher. So I headed up and chatted with My niece Sarah for a good little bit up at Liz’s house, and then Jim came over when he was done with the meeting, seeing that I was at Liz’s place, So we headed down to the deck.
We realized pretty quickly once we are at the deck, that we didn’t have everything we needed to do the job. We needed some 4x4s as Jack extenders to be able to raise up the deck from a pretty good distance. It was about 8 ft ish from the bottom of the deck to the creek bed, and we needed at least three big posts.
One of Jim’s friends also has been having some health issues, is basically blind in one eye, and just lost about 90% of the vision in his other eye, so Jim headed out to give him a blessing while I worked together the necessary resources to jack up the deck.
I also took my mini excavator into the creek, and built up a little bank of rocks underneath the overhang of the deck, so we could set up the jacks outside of the water.
Amazingly, I had everything basically ready to go when he got back. All three jacks in place with big fence posts as jack extenders, and 4x4s at the top of each post to span several rows of deck support. I had all three of my floor jacks set up to be able to do the work.
Unfortunately, though I thought I was completely prepared, once I started jacking things up, I realized that my foundations weren’t as solid as I had hoped. Having piled up the rock, and with the massive weight of the deck, the jacks would sink into the rock and go sideways.
Eventually, and gratefully, I was able to get enough of a foundation built for each of them that we were able to jack up the deck, do the measurements, set the screws, and get everything put together such that the deck doesn’t sag anymore, or only a tiny bit.
🥳
Yay!
Two more boards to screw in, which won’t be a big deal, and then the next step is to paint the thing. 😊
Once it’s painted, it’s going to look so much better.
Yay!
Doing all that work actually took a massive chunk of the day. I think I was out there until 3:00 or after?
After that, I spent some time helping Sarah with the remodel of her room.
Not much after that.
Tweaked my back working on everything, so that wasn’t great. It’s already got plenty of issues. 😅
Went to the grocery store.
Wasted a lot of time. 😅
And way too late to bed.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 