The renovations continue and it’s time to for another project in the side yard (the fence was last summer). I got some ipe deck lumber from my friend Scott, who had it left over from some of design/build company’s jobs. The problem was I had a lot of short boards and there were some 1″ and some 3/4″. What to do? Ah ha, fly my 73 year-old, retired, engineer Dad for a week of manual labor. He’ll be able to figure it out.

We came up with a rough plan, use the 3/4″ boards for the small deck and because we had so many short lengths we hung the joist every 12″. I thought we’d have enough wood for the whole deck but we only had about 50%. Luckily MacBeath Hardwoods in town had a bunch of ipe boards in a pile out back of their warehouse. They had been there a while, so we were able to negotiate on the price, they even milled some down. Ipe turns grey over time so it didn’t match the other lumber I had. I was going to sand the whole deck but once it was installed I really liked the effect of different colors.

The problem with the lumber I had was a lot of the boards were warped and crowned. I did a little research and found this tool called the BoWrench which worked amazingly well. Without it we would’ve been hosed.

As for the hardware we bought screws specifically for ipe decks. Stainless steel, special threads, powder coated heads, but the crazy thing was they were 30 cents apiece! x 600. We had to counter-sink and pre-drill all the holes anyway so probably not worth it. It’s rock hard wood, funny enough the first hole I attempted to drill broke the bit. I had to get some Bosch titanium bits and they worked fine.

Anyway, the deck came out great. We lucked out on buying the exact amount of treated lumber for the structure. We weren’t really measuring the width of the boards to the final side but it worked out perfectly with out needing to rip the end board.

At least I’m trying to make it that way. My wife has been making me a cake on my birthday for the last 4 years. It started with Cartman, then Professor Chaos, followed by the Vitra Polder Sofa!!!?, and last years awesome Obey Obama Hope poster. I’m trying to not expect a cake every year but when they’re this amazing it’s hard not to. I hate blogs that go off on how talented and amazing the authors wife or husband is, but what the hell, she’s pretty cool.

This is the card I designed for my wife Brenna, a floral designer. It was printed by my friend Ben at The Mandate Press in SLC. The cool thing is, he posted these photos on his Flikr page and this card is now on like 10 different design blogs.