Today was a long day at the office. I spent a good deal of time daydreaming about the deck. I hauled ass home, completely forgeting that it was payday and that I was going to swing by the bank to deposit my check (literally, I just remembered that I have a paycheck in my wallet).
I came home and stared at the rafters for a while. I thought I could measure the rafter on both sides of the deck, snap the chalkline and go through them with a pencil and square. I soon realized that that wouldn’t work because I’d have to snap the chalkline on the tops of the rafters and I didn’t have a tall enough ladder to see the tops.
So I measured each rafter 14″ off the supporting 2×6. Dumb me assumed that the support boards (I had to splice two 12′ 2×6’s to span the deck) were square.
I attempted to saw the rafters while they were set in place. I painstakingly sawed one with a circular saw but the saw binded as I would reach the end of my cut. I tried the jig saw but I couldn’t get a good enough angle with my eye to follow the center of my guide line. I tried the laser guided jig saw but the sun was beating down on the boards so the laser wouldn’t show up.
I stared at my rafters some more. I was thinking of everything that I could possibly do aside from having to take them all down and cut them on the ground.
I harnessed my TKD black belt skills and jumped 13-feet into the air and landed a mean front snap kick. 2×6 boards set on-end are hard to kick and cut a straight line. I tried using The Force. I clenched my eyes as well as my entire body and could only muster a fart.
I ended up taking each and every damn board down and cutting them. Scholar Josh didn’t think to measure the boards from the end of the boards that are set square against the house. No no no, he cut them at the 14″ mark that he drew earlier when he thought he was going to miraculously cut them while he was dangling from a ladder with a circular saw.
So I pulled all of the rafters down and cut them. I then put them back up. I wiped the sweat from my brow, sighed a sigh of relief and summoned The Force again.
I walked to the side of the deck to see a straight-line view of how my perfectly-measured, squared-up rafters looked. Theyy looked like cousin Cleatus’s teeth after a night of “smile 3-feet from the ass-end of this donkey while Bubba drops fireworks in the feed trough”.
Yeah, that’s a far-fetched Haiku but I’d rather do that right now than take those damn rafters down and cut ’em again.
Damn you deck. Damn you. Damn you. Damn you.