Stair Sides

We got off to a late start today, which is better than we did yesterday, when the combination of our relentless social schedule and checking out the local food truck thing and the fact that our neighbors were having a garage sale so we of course had to hang out and chat with them rather than squeeze in some work all came together for a big fat zero on things we checked off the remaining items list for the deck.

Anyway, we popped that one board on the side of the deck, then turned to the side of the upper stair.

That went pretty quickly, in part because Noel just copied what he'd done on the other side.

It's starting to really pull together. We both remarked on how surprising it is that putting the side pieces up just ties it all together.

With the stair side finished, we began worrying over the boards we have remaining. We'd rather not buy any more ipe -- not only is it pretty expensive, but we have a lot of little boards from cutting the ends off of things. We'd like to use those up.

Our plan had been to run boards on the sides of the lower stairs the same way we did them on the upper stairs, but it became clear with some poking and prodding at what we had that that would not work. So the last long-ish boards got to become the hatch:

We haven't tied them all together to make a solid piece, but clearly they are strong enough that we don't need to do more than tie them together so they come out as a single piece.

Then Noel installed the boards on one side of the lower stairs. We came up with this vertical arrangement to use up the many tiny board ends we have left over, and I think it worked out pretty nicely.

Even before they were all trimmed there was something compelling about the vertical arrangement.

Noel trimmed them at an angle with the help of the MultiMaster and a straight edge. It came out better than I expected.

I think it looks pretty amazingly good, and I suggested to Noel that we add more framing around the deck and do a vertical skirt. He just gave me a look.

So, one more side like this, then trimming all those ragged ends off things. Then we're not done, but we can put away a bunch of tools and pretend we're done.

posted by ayse on 07/01/12