You Know What Would Be Handy?

Ok, so the first thing to note, we solved the mail box impasse opportunity. We both like these, they are wood, which means we can stain them a slightly darker blue than the deck, and I went to Michael's to get wooden letters, which spell out "Mail". The bottom plate will have our house numbers on it.

We are both pleased, and we got both pieces for less than half of the mail box from yesterday. We are happy. (And, I can keep buying wool. The way I figure it, I saved us $100 on the mailbox from yesterday, so I can spend the $100 saved, plus my commission as a frugalista, so another $50, right?)

And you know what would be handy? Really handy? Astonishingly handy? A home renovation store right next to our house. By my calculations we lost somewhere in the neighbourhood of 2 hours at the Rona. . .

First we forgot the angle brackets, and then we had to re-visit the mail box hostility issue, and then we needed another 10 feet of flashing (which was the first place we looked at each other, and had problems doing very basic math).

So, we got home, and we started the stairs. And then we realized that we couldn't finish the stairs, because while we had purchased angle brackets (2 of them, sitting all shiny and new, on the floor boards), we needed 7 angle brackets. And no matter how bad you are at math, 2 doesn't make 7. So, back to the hardware store.

But, this person turned up, and she was the best thing we had seen all day (including the mail box we selected). She turned up at 9:00 tonight, with coffee in her hands. She also said very nice things about our work. Thanks Mum!


So, where else did we lose time? Oh yeah. The stairs. In our time estimate, we said, "Stairs. Stairs will take about an hour." Did you know time telling is part of math? Must be. We got that wrong too. We were only 25% right. It didn't take one hour to do the stairs, it took 4. Also, a few tense moments, especially because the measuring tape continually disappeared. Measuring tape gremlins, Mr. Spit is convinced. (Probably, also, they were buggering up our math).


So, here's the finished product, with railings and all. Which, when you think about it, is exactly what we started with. Flooring and railings.

These look better, right?