Yes, I am a big wuss. I am a balding, hairy backed, little girl in knee socks.
Here is the deal. I am finally going to build the landings and stairs for my deck. There will be an upper landing at the level of the deck, and a lower landing with three steps leading down to the yard. The lower landing will have steps going down from two adjacent sides. The third side will obviously have the stairs going up to the upper landing. and, the forth side will just have a railing along the edge. There will be two posts holding up the outer edge of the upper landing, and the inner edge will be bolted to the rim joist of the deck. The lower landing will have four posts. I have to pour footers for each of these six posts. Around here, rules are that footers have to be 36 inches deep. Well, when I dug the footers for the deck, after 36 inches we were still bringing up top soil and a bit of gravel. No clay, no big rocks, no sand and certainly no bedrock. So, we put the extention bar on the power auger and went another 18 inches down. We only just started hitting clay and rock at the 54 inch deep level. Those holes were 12 inches in diameter and they sucked up about 7 80 pound bags of cement each. These landing footers will only be 8 inches in diameter but will most likely still go 54 inches deep, plus a little above grade. Each hole will take a bit more than 3 80 pound bags to fill, a total of about 20 80 pound bags. I'll will now describe where I live for those of you who haven't heard my rantings before. For those of you who have, just ignore me as usual. >From the street you have to walk up 10 steps, then there is a little 2 foot landing. Then you go up another 10 steps. Then there is a 60 foot long landing. Then up another 10 steps, 2 foot landing, 10 steps, 5 foot landing, three more steps. OK, you are almost there. You are now at one end of a courtyard. I, of course, live at the far end of the courtyard. So, walk about 170 feet down the courtyard trying to stay on the sidewalk without kicking over the little mushroom lights or flowers along the edges. Now turn left and go around the side of my house, through a gate, and into the yard. Now imagine humping 80 pound bags of cement along that whole thing. Rather than do all 20 bags in one day, I decided we would do 4 bags per evening, each night of this week. When we got to Lowes last night, and were looking at the bags of concrete, I just couldn't face it. I did not want to hump those 80 pound bags up all those damn stairs and along the courtyard. So, I noticed that next to the 80 pound bags were these nice 40 pound bags of cement. Sure, it would cost a bit more money, on the order of 20 or 25 bucks more, and require twice as many trips, but 40 pound trips are sooo much better than 80 pound trips. I caved. Yep, I admit it, I am a girly man. I slung 8 40 pound bags onto the cart, loaded them into the trunk of our car, and since Teresa insists on helping, we unloaded the bags at home. I ran the bags up to the long landing. Teresa took them from there to the house. She had the longer distance so I unloaded the bags faster than she could bring them up to the house, so I hauled them from the landing to the top of the stairs and she moved them from there to the house on a dolly. It actually only took a few minutes, but was so much less painful than those 80 pounders. One night down, four more to go. Hopefully, we'll get the footers dug and poured this weekend. I'll let the list know how it goes. -- Blue skies. Dan Rossi Carnegie Mellon University. E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: (412) 268-9081
