Red Needs Water Badly

On September 4th we received our next batch of wood for the deck.

The guy delivering the wood warned me about
some of the pieces. He didn't pull them, but if
he had he'd have gotten me better boards, as he
builds decks as a side job on the weekends.

That meant I worked on the deck this weekend.

I have 42 rows to replace, so I bought enough wood for 21 rows plus a bit extra to compensate for any bad boards.

So today, I put down nine rows.

One more row here will barely fit within the
length of a 16 foot board, and then I'll have to use
combinations of 8 foot and 12 foot boards.

It was also quite the adventure, given that I dropped a couple of things that fell down under the deck, so I had to crawl under it to get to the drill bit and screws. I was sure not going to go on another trip to the hardware store for another countersink bit.

The hardest part of the deck work has been ripping out the old boards:

The damage.

I'm going to have to break those down and safely remove/bend the nails before I can get too much farther along. These 4 inch-wide boards may look pretty, but there's a lot more of them than there would have been if the previous homeowner had used the more commonly used 6 inch wide boards. Sure, I could have replaced the 4 inch boards with 6 inch, but that would have required me ripping out all of the boards so I could properly do it. And I really wasn't going to do that and leave the deck in an incomplete state for a couple of months.

The weather today was fantastic. Almost too much so, because in my focus on my work I neglected to hydrate and even eat some lunch. (I did have a handful of nuts, so I wasn't completely crazy.) Right now, I'm paying the price by nursing a headache while I drink water. 

EtA: It's countersink, not counterstrike. /sigh