The deck

I just have to dedicate a post to something that Kenneth has spent half the summer fixing so we could enjoy it - well, actually most of the summer. This is a very long story that I will try and make short.

First, here are pictures of Kenneth building the deck last summer - it only took him 2 weekends!











This spring we were out one day (one of the first days we were able to go out), and we noticed 2 holes on either side of the air conditioner, causing the air conditioner to be at an unsafe tilt.
So, we called a trapper right away to catch the ground hogs that were causing the holes. The holes were mostly under the deck, so we couldn't see them too well, we just knew they were big and causing our air conditioner to sink. So, $300 and 2 weeks later, the trapper said there were no ground hogs. He caught a cat and a raccoon, but no ground hogs. So, Kenneth decided to pull up the boards on the deck around the air conditioner, and we found 2 huge vertical holes, about 5 feet deep and 2 feet wide. That weekend, Kenneth filled the two holes with 4,500 lbs. of dirt.

In about 1 week, the huge holes were back, after a couple heavy rains. Very long story short, over the next couple weeks we had an architect, an engineer, a city guy, a county guy, and many other friends and guys over to get their opinions and they all said the same thing - "I've never seen anything like that!" we also paid another $300 to get roto rooter to make sure it wasn't the sewage line. (which it wasn't).

Kenneth even had a friend come over and lower and him into the holes head first, so he could see if they met in the middle or what they looked like down there. These pictures are of that. You can see how deep they are!







Finally, the consensus was that there must be some kind of a crack in our cystern and we just needed to fill the hole as best we could. So, it took Kenneth another 3 weekends or so to actually fill the hole (he's gone about half of every week, so it was basically just weekends he had) - he filled it with 2" rocks, then some really large rocks, then some dirt, now we still need to add a few more rocks to the top.
After all that, Kenneth had to buy some new boards, finish putting the deck back together and we stained it this week - so here is the finished product! Let's hope we're done with deck problems.