The Arecibo radio telescope collapsed fully, destroying everything that was left. Trump spent $3m on a recount only for them to find another several hundred votes for Biden. One of the coffee shops I try to support 2-3 times a week had to close due to a COVID case. The biker bar I get a takeout breakfast omelette from on Saturdays (to try and help them out) had to close due to two cases. I finished all the shows I was watching with my wife on our streaming services, so we watched the latest "Bill & Ted" film and are watching Bones now... both of which are OK, but nothing more. Learning how to use my new synthesizers has me watching endless hours of YouTube videos and downloading dozens of updates, to get everything sorted out... which then means the YouTube videos are out of date and talking about versions/features which have changed. And very little music-making happening... I finished removing the old duct work from our old oil-based heating system downstairs... and had to insulate and do a bunch of reframing where the old heat vents used to be. And framing in a space 11 inches tall by 12 feet long by 3 feet deep is just fucking impossible... so I cut all the wood pieces about 1/8" too big, and just wedged them into place, so I could get my battery powered nailgun close enough to put in a couple of tack nails in to kinda hold it all in place. Gonna regret that in the future, I'm pretty sure. Got the final bid for replacing the deck on my house and it's the astonishingly enormous sum of $35k for a 15x15 second-floor deck with a staircase!! Which is less than the $40k bid, but not enough to matter. And I just can't see spending that... but my deck is rotting and coming apart at the seams... so I have to do something... but there are no "good" options... And work at my day job is winding down - my company closes for 2 weeks over Christmas and New Years - and so I have even less to do, but still need to be at my computer and available on email and slack for all the inevitable questions Salespeople will have as they try desperately to meet their numbers before we close down for the year.... interminable waiting interspersed with panicked flurries of urgent pointless chaos... Man... I'm just done. Can we just skip ahead to this exact same day, 2021, please?
Have you considered doing part of the constructing yourself, leaving the critical construction details to the pros? Doing the floor and the railing (apart from the posts) shouldn't be too hard with some tools and know-how, which you seem to have.
Actually YES! Just yesterday. My wife and I went out into the beautiful crisp sunshine with a tape measure, a pad of paper, and a construction pencil. We took a close look at the existing framing and joists, and saw that our deck - contrary to our loosely-held belief it was 'rickety' - found it to be stoutly built on 4x10s, and all of the joists (except maybe one) are in great condition. It's just the decking that has failed (due to a lack of diligent care for the wood), and the top boards on the railings have warped over time. So we measured everything. Figured out how many linear board feet I'd need to replace all the decking - about 1,300 feet or so - and priced lumber and composites. Various lumber is around $1 per board foot, and composites are up to about $3.50 or so. Worst case, that's $5k of materials. That I can EASILY install myself. Which leaves us a healthy budget to do a nice black anodized aluminum railing, with a composite material top rail. ($7k, or so.) That would use narrower vertical aluminum pipes, rather than wood, which would greatly improve the view of the yard from the various second-floor house windows. So yeah. I'm pretty jazzed about the whole thing now! This is all preliminary right now... still need to do the structural math (composite is heavier than wood) and consult with the people at Dunn Lumber about decking solutions, but I'm very optimistic about the future of our deck for the very first time...