Day 34: After (finally!)

So my house is finally free of its tarp, my lawn is (mostly) free of garbage, and my driveway is free of the trailer with all my old deck wood in it. Which means the deck is done!

The deck color turned out pretty good, though it doesn't match the red paint look of the base of the deck. That's not such a bad thing, though.

My inner perfectionist is annoyed that the guy couldn't be bothered to make sure the railings were evenly spaced. They're all scrunched together in the far right corner, and further left of that, are extra wide. A minor quibble, to be sure, but the railings were evenly spaced before, and visually it looks a lot nicer.

He also narrowed my staircase from 4 feet to 3 feet. Which is fine, as a concept, but he promised to add a 4th support rail in the back (there are/were 3) and keep it at 4 feet...and then I guess he got lazy.

(And, to add to the inner perfectionism, now there are 6 inches on either side of the base of the deck that are off-color/gross looking because they didn't get the same red paint as the rest of the base of the deck.)

Here you can see the color contrast a bit better. Since it's just top vs. bottom it's not bad, especially since when you're on the deck you won't know the difference.

Of course, Evil Contractor also promised that if I paid him the higher fee (which I did) that he'd add extra support to the 2 corners of the deck and put that in concrete for extra stability...and then that turned into "oh, well, that'll cost another $300", so I opted not to (as other contractors had said the base was fine, and Evil Contractor's evil so I didn't want to give him any more money than I absolutely had to).

Overall, I like the way the deck looks (hard not to improve on before, really). It feels a lot sturdier now (also hard not to improve, as before the boards were all nailed in and the nails kept coming out).

I'd give it a 6/10. It got the job done, not quite for the "steal" price it should have been, but it's not "wow, now that's a deck" (which, of course, is what Evil Contractor promised I'd be saying when it was done). At least the other contractor/handyman guy I worked with was very nice and helpful and awesome, and I was happy to give his name to my neighbors.