I'm in the middle of building a deck. If you've built a deck before, you know that it's a fair amount of work. Being an over-achiever of course I can't do a simple rectangular deck that's bolted to the house on one side. Mine is a free standing 14 foot square, which requires a central beam in addition to the beams on the edges, built into a corner of the house. The corner opposite the corner of the house is cut at a 45 degree angle, making each of the legs leading to that corner 7 feet, and that face 10 feet long. The planking runs parallel to the angled edge, which is diagonal to the beams and the joists.

In case you haven't worked it out, this is kind of a big project to take on for only the second framing project I've ever built (the first was my fireplace). Now, I'm familiar with pine and the fact that dimensional stability isn't its strong point. Pressure treated lumber makes regular two-by pine look like a model of stability. My wife is less familiar. So when she found a plank that was undersized and an off color in the deck, there was trouble. It was green like Wolmanized lumber, not the more or less natural color of the rest of our Thomsonized planking, and about an eighth of an inch narrower than the plank it butted up against. My wife woke me up, crying, because in her words "It looks like a child's drawing of a deck, not an actual deck."

The DeckThe trick of course is that I've already laid in all the decking around this plank, so the replacement plank has to fit in a spot that tapers down to 1/8th of an inch less than the width of a proper plank. So where am I early on Sunday morning? Home Depot, looking for a block plane. Back home, I had to see if I remembered my father's lessons on how to sharpen a plane, how to set it up, and how to use it. Fortunately, I seem to have remembered correctly, because within half an hour of coming home I was taking gorgeous curls of wood off the edge of a test plank. When I was done, I presented my wife with the curls, which I think are going to wind up in a scrapbook somewhere. Because some days, love looks like a block plane.