Ingenuity

I am married to SUCH a smart guy. When we were living at the parsonage, and there were problems that the trustees couldn't fix, Gary would find ways to resolve a problem. He figured out mistakes made in the past, and fixed them. Sometimes he made repairs that were done wrong by the person who did it the first time.

And now at the new house we have/had this mess where the swimming pool used to be. There were mistakes made in building, and he's figured out how to fix those mistakes without trashing the whole project and starting from scratch. He's filled in the mega-deep hole that was the diving area in the pool. He's figured out how to refurbish the deck that was not kept up properly. And it looks so NICE. Now, I cannot believe how humongous this deck is. But it's what's there, and it would take a whole lot more work (and even a whole lot more money) to shrink the size of the deck, so we're gonna have us one humongous deck for many a year to come. :-)

Y'know how the skeleton of a house always goes up SO fast? You can't believe how fast that building goes up. When the construction crew gets to putting in baseboards and light-switches, the speed of the progress seems to slow down considerably. Well, the deck seems to be the reverse of that. Right now (not unlike my housecleaning yesterday, where the slow part was the decision-making at the start of the task), Gary's gotten himself past the pokey parts of the job and is just burning through his job of piecing things back together. Every day when I go out back to hang laundry, I see what he accomplished the preceding evening, and am amazed that anybody who spent his study time with theology and educational methods and Greek has managed to get so good with building and working with his hands and problem-solving.

This afternoon we sealed the new lumber that replaced rotted boards. Assuming the weather holds up, he may only need another week or two to finish the project. Then it will be on to making raised beds for gardening, as well as obtaining topsoil (for where the pool used to be) and planting grass seed. And Gary even had some really cool ideas about the garden beds that will recycle used lumber to save money, terrace the spots where the pool was cut down into the hill in back of the house, and look really classy and artistic as well as being practical. Wow!