Side stairs progress

You gotta love tradies who will work on a public holiday. Mr D and Scotty arrived at 6am and commenced constructing the new side stairs.

The morning was like this:

Mr D the builder clamping the timber in place..

This was first thing in the morning. The boys put the tall timber posts into the metal stirrups.

Throughout the day we could see steady progress. Jason pitched in as the first year builder's apprentice. He got all the monkey boy jobs, like priming the timber ends, holding posts and beams straight and passing tools to the lads.

Jason must've been a useful part of the team, because later in the morning the lads whisked him away to have smoko with them. He's in, our wannabe tradie Jason.

The first of the timber stair stringers is being fitted

Mr D uses an awesome pink drill, which will now be referred to as the lifestyle drill (I've made a mental not for Jason this Father's Day)

Jason took the opportunity to pull down the side fence which had fully rotted in the supporting posts. It was starting to get to that dangerous stage, so Jason dumped most of the fence into the rubbish skip Mr D had organised for the stairs.

We'll widen the path for easier access to our backyard

We'll also be removing the garden bed closest to the house as it narrows our path. It will allow us to have a wider more direct route to our side stairs.

Later down the track, we'll probably reinstate a new side fence, but that can wait until we have more time and money!

By late afternoon, the boys got through quite a bit of work with the stairs very close to completion. They'll be coming back over the weekend to finish the balustrades and nail the final few decking boards onto the back landing.

almost complete stairs

The second stage of the process is to add a roof, but we have to wait until Mr D and Scotty are between building projects. They're busy people.