The deck is nearly complete. A few rail caps and benches and it will be done. The door still needs to be cut out and the water moved.

Here are some good pictures:

The privacy fence looks nice.

Here’s the walkout rebuilt:

Today, despite a few storms, a lot got done. I think it is looking great. The railing are almost done and it is really taking shape:

The only real excitement came when the builders found a bee’s nest. Overall, very happy.

As always, follow the progress @ Deck Remodel

A lot of progess today on the deck. Most of the framing is done:

My daughter is on the new “bridge” that goes over top of the walkout and connects the two different decks. We would have like it to have been an arched bridge; however, the chimney didn’t really permit this. If you notice I have a level on it in the above picture, the left side is a little lower than right…not sure if this can be fixed or if it is good enough. It might just be me being picky.

Today, they started to “make dirt” according to my son. They dug all all of the holes and set the posts in concrete:

A few hiccups, though. We originally were going to have a pergola about were our concrete pad is. However, we expanded the original deck design to cover the whole patio and we couldn’t keep the pergola without a post in front of our backdoor. But the most important for us is to have the right design.

Today I was doing some yard work and was trying to kill off some weeds. I was using RoundUp and ran out. I found a simple homemade recipe online today and tried it out:

• 1 gallon of White Vinegar
• 1 cup of Salt
• 1 tablespoon of Dawn or dishwashing soap

It costs about $1 to make and worked a lot better that RoundUp did. About 2 hours later, everything that I sprayed with the homemade stuff was totally dead. The weeds that I sprayed with RoundUp looked unaffected.

Ever since we bought this house, we have had a major problem with our back yard. A walk was put it with cheap “indoor” railings around it. It was unsafe and an eyesore:

In addition, we have a concrete patio next to it that was ok but could use a make over:

We decided to get the whole back of the house redone. Tomorrow, the deck remodel begins.

I thought this was a cute picture of my kids taken a nap:

I call it “2 Left Feet”

My daughter sang the ABC song for her Kindergarten graduation:

Thursday night, I installed the beta Office 07 on my laptop. Still a little bumpy, still trying to get it running right. Anyways, I was very interested in what new “tagging” features or equivalent that Outlook 2007 might have. Initially, I was a little disappointed but still evaluating it. I read a few people’s impressions on this topic and came across the whole “Getting Things Done” approach. I am very interested in this topic and will research more about it.

I wrote a vb.net program a few months ago that leverages CookComputing.com‘s XML-RPC library. I just upgraded to using Framework 2.0. The upgrade wizard did an ok job with the migrate. It did find a few items but it wasn’t too bad. My biggest offending issue was some background threads that were not updating form elements via invoking on the main thread. I knew about this issue but I was just lazy…and this was utility for me. However, it forced me to make it threadsafe…which I think is a good thing.