carpentry
in my hubris i offered to redo my mum's decking after someone fell through the old one
after 11 years of use our old decking succumbed to the elements and tried to take someone's foot as they sat down for lunch. instead of patching the hole my mother decided it could all be redone, so i offered to do it for the low price of maybe 50 quid and also her feeding me for my whole life.
the first obstacle was our lack of power tools and my mums lack of will to let me use them anyway. the second was that 1 year earlier they had demolished the wickes up the road to make some blocks of flats. and the third was that our car was not actually big enough to hold the long bits of wood we intended to purchase.
i won't detail all of the woes of the build, but let it be known that while from the upcoming pictures it may look slipshod, it is structurally significantly sounder than the previous decking thanks to us accidentally purchasing more joist material than we needed for a mere replica of the last job.
all ends were hand sawed, with each plank balanced on top of a pile of other planks as we didn't have any other appropriate surfaces. from lunch onwards i had aid of my friend jack and we did have a drill for the fixing of the planks. the weird hatch looking bits are in fact hatches, designed so that you can access the drains underneath without having to un-drill anything.
i think all would agree she got what she paid for