Building a Deck...

One day, my supervisor, Brad Diver, looked at me and said—“can you build me an HVAC deck behind house number 26?” I hesitantly and relatively confidently responded, “sure.” Our supervisor told us that when building an HVAC deck, all the fundamentals of building a house must be taken into consideration. With that, he left us in charge.

I have worked on decks before—laying down the deck boards and screwing them in. I knew how to level, measure, saw, and hammer, I wondered “how hard could it be?” Well, I had never built a deck from scratch before and with not much more instruction than, “go build a deck,” I set out to complete the task.

Lindsey and I worked together on the deck. First we had to decide the dimensions, and then decide where exactly the deck was going to go. We had to concern ourselves with how to attach the deck to the house and how exactly to sink posts into the ground.

Of course we were unable to locate the post digger, so a shovel was made to work. And of course, we found a few obstacles in the ground to maneuver around, pipes and wires—excellent. Finally we get the posts situated into the ground and then we had to level them. Building a square is not as easy as it seems—especially when it is four and a half feet in the air.

The building of the deck presented challenge after challenge. No further instructions were given to us from Brad. We had to sort it out ourselves. Lots of thinking, lots of ‘redo’s’, and lots of work later, we finally accomplished building the HVAC deck.

Although it took all day, completing the deck came with an awesome sense of accomplishment. I was able to put all of the skills that I had learned and acquired throughout the past two months into action and build a solid, sturdy, purposeful structure. It was a challenge, but it was worth every frustrating moment.