Matt’s latest:

Ah,boothbay harbor, i am jealous if that is possible considering i am in paradise. Anyway, we are going back to the school in a few minutes, and i’m just doing some emailing before we catch the bus. Yes Leon should definitely be a good time and i will spend a lot of time in the shower as well as at the beach. But dont you worry because we will be very careful and only swim where the locals tell us it’s safe. On the afternoons that we do not do work, we do excursions for the school, or go out with the kids from my house, who are 19 and 21. Life is good here, and i will talk to you soon
Much love
mateo

The last two weeks Chris and I have been working on what we knew was the worst rot problem at Applewod (intentional, I’d rather not have owners Googling their way to the blog). From a distance we could see the deck was way off level, as if someone had lifted the outside in order to roll the deck furniture through the sliding door. I hoped it was all frost heaves; it turned out to be that and a rotted sagging building.

We dutifully supported this wobbly second floor deck with enough lumber to build an entire suburb. When we finished with the supports it looked like the thing could walk away, centipede-like, but we no longer worried it would collapse and kill us.

We (okay, Chris) then cut the deck away from the building by sawing a two foot channel the entire width. This provided the necessary room to repair the building rotted by years of seeping water. But this isn’t so much an essay about construction work, as construction talk.

Whenever we’d finish an important stage, like freeing the deck without it falling down, I’d holler, “We did good.”

“We did well,” Chris would correct me.

To be continued…. (I was up late last night losing money to my poker friends)