A Well Earned Vacation

This week I am enjoying some time off of work. Traditionally, I am really bad a actually taking my vacation time, but this year I am trying really hard to at least take some of it. Having a project to work on has helped, though it feels like less of a vacation.

I am working on scraping and painting my back deck. The deck is this unnecessarily huge addition that the prior owners had put on. It is large enough for quite a party. Unfortunately, they had a single layer of the cheapest paint put on the deck, which is now peeling off. Thus my long term project of scraping off all the old paint and staining it with some higher quality stain that hopefully will not come off any time soon. It is hot, dirty work that is generally unpleasant.

I have reserved the most dangerous part for my vacation. There is a trellis over the deck that needs a thorough scraping and two coats of stain. I can get to some of it via a ladder, but there is a layer at the top which I can only get to from above. I built a wood bridge that enables me to walk around supported on the strongest parts. As I sit up there scraping away the whole thing lightly sways. Over the weekend I finished phase one (scraping) and yesterday I started painting. If I finish the trellis this week it will be a miracle and a large step forward in completing the whole project.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking that I work hard so that I can pay someone else to do this work. It has never really been my style to pay someone else to do work that I could do, so there I am up in the rafters.