Rolling the Rails

As summer dwindled and fall was nearly upon us, we were rushing to complete outside work in between splitting firewood.

One of the last projects was the handrailing around our deck, most of which is more for decoration. We had already installed railing where it was required for occupancy the year before. Initially, we thought this railing would be temporary but as we began to price railing that usually went with engineered decking, we found the cost was ridiculously high.

That meant we were sticking with our ‘temporary’ railing. Some what we had put up I had already primed but there still was a lot left to do. It was so hard to prime and paint railing already installed. Plus, I had to two coat it to cover the primer.

As usual, my job was the prep work and Jer did the build. We purchased a bunch of two by fours and a LOT of one-by-one sticks to make spindles. I would prime or paint two sides of whatever was on our sawhorse makeshift rack, then run to go help stack wood. Then I would run back to prime or paint the other two sides, take my gloves off to run to the next job.

You would think that we had enough wood to do the whole project, but we had the same situation with the inside window trim…always running out. Jer would build until he ran out of wood and I would try to stay ahead of him. Eventually, we just needed to buy more wood. It was a tremendous amount of work but really gave our home that finished look, more the way we envisioned it.

Other than that, we had the ceiling to install on the lower deck. We hadn’t originally planned to do this, and it ended up being harder than expected. At one point when Jer was feeling especially frustrated, I suggested we walk away from it for that weekend. My lack of arm strength to help hold up Hardy Plank (cement boards) while standing on ladders didn’t help the situation.

We eventually finished and worked around the weather to get it painted. I really liked it because it makes everything look finished.