If you build it...

The idea of hard manual labor has always appealed to me. I guess I just like doing stuff. Meaning I like to be active, have something to keep me occupied. Like a project. Or maybe it's my subconscious rebelling against the soft academic life I lead. All I know is that I have always wanted to spend a summer exerting myself, getting my hands dirty. Roofing was always the ideal, for some reason. Not sure why. Anyway, I realized a few weeks ago that this is the last summer I would ever really have a chance to do that, at least until my student loans are paid off.

So I'm currently rebuilding the deck on my parents' house, and boy howdy is it a bitch. The idea was to leave the current superstructure unaltered and simply rip up the old floorboards and steps and replace them. Sounds simple enough. Unfortunately, the original builders did everything in their power to make my job more difficult. Nails were driven in so crookedly and haphazardly that I can only assume they were cross-eyed. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just not a quality that lends itself to driving nails in straight. The slanted nails wouldn't be so bad if they hadn't been used with such fetishistic determination. The rust doesn't help, either. I've snapped the heads off two hammers prying out bent rusty nails, and I don't even have half the floor up. And as if all that wasn't trouble enough, turns out a 2 x 10 today is about an eighth of an inch wider than a 2 x 10 in 1985. Who knew?