All hands on deck

The man behind the counter at the timber merchants yard was oversized. His sawdust speckled clothes hung around his bulky form, a grubby and stained red and white rugby jersey with a long since expired sponsor logo emblazoned across the chest. Working denim trousers showed his hairy belly and bum crack in equal measure as he went about his business. His feet were clad in obviously brand new rigger boots, bright mellow fawn coloured like a partly ripened banana. Perhaps the Sales Rep had just been with incentives to push Caterpillar products. 

I had popped into the sales counter straight from work and my suit seemed to aggravate him as though I was wearing the strip of the rugby team from the other side of the city. He came directly at me, a bit threateningly even with a melamine worktop between us and said,  "You need decking". 

Without a ? at the end this statement could be taken as a confrontational opener. "Thick as two short planks" was his usual following joke as he pointed out some timber deck samples at the end of the counter. I was looking indeed to purchase a fair amount of decking for what was a fledgling and secret project in which I would be the self appointed foreman and with my three young children as labourers. My wife was going away for a long weekend on a Grand Tour to Florence, Italy and in that window of opportunity the germ of an idea to makeover a part of the dismal back garden would take root and hopefully, continuing the analogy, grow to fruition.

The double external doors overlooking the garden were certainly a positive feature. If stood at about the mid point of the room all that could be seen through closed doors was the green of the lawn, herbaceous borders, the pear tree and the gable end of Mrs Murphy's detached house. This was a pleasant outlook, well apart from the last thing. However, the nearer you got to the doors a frightful scene came into view of an expanse of black tarmac, gently inclined to meet a course of plain concrete paving stones and the straggly edge of the lawn. Frequent use of the doors, as was unvoidable with young children and dogs had gradually led to the transfer of the sticky bituminous surface from outdoors to indoors and we were forever having to sweep out and deep shampoo the whole of the ground floor of the house and up the stairs. We had decided to invest, well using the word invest does make a large financial outlay a bit more palatable and justified, in real wood floors in our heavy use areas of hallway and dining room. It was therefore important to tackle the horrible tarry pit.

In my mind, not the most practical or multi-task proficient, I had already sketched out a design. In a freak of maths, science, architecture and geography the upward slope of the scraggy yard was the exact depth and gradient from the back of the house of a standard shop bought length of 4" x 2" timber. Against all the odds this depth was also made to measure for decking planks laid across the anticipated skeletal frame. This meant that the need to cut any timber would be much reduced but still the greatest source of misgivings to me. The project appeared to be destiny because the contractor putting down the wood floors in the house left all his wonderful tools, including an accurate and foolproof power saw for what would be the duration of the family endeavour. Timber decking was all the fashion at the time and I had seen the worst excesses of full garden coverage and quite overwhelming structures complete with balustrades, steps and hot tub enclosures. I had a more subtle and tasteful scheme on the mental drawing board.

The design was also, with the input of the children, to include a couple of reclaimed railway sleepers,  a pond and some plum coloured slate fragments. My tendency to grossly overload the car and put my offspring in harms way was continued as we picked up the entire supply of timber materials and fixings from now my best mate at the Merchants.We took quite a roundabout route across town to avoid the attentions of the police. The tailgate on the car had to be tied up half open and the children insisted on waving out of it at what started to resemble a slow moving funereal procession convoy behind. With the car unloaded the suspension seemed to return to normal settings. Within a couple of hours a large tipper truck had dumped half a ton of slate and two very authentic bits of railway heritage on the driveway. When ordering the slate I had not really thought about what half a ton would look like. I had also neglected to allow for the sheer weight of the sleepers compared to the upper body strength of the children to shift them.

Work progressed well, happily and in complete harmony between the four of us. Hannah, the eldest seemed to have an eye for the architectural concepts, Alice (middle child), a flair for creativity and the youngest, William was good at methodical disciplines. The smell of efficiently and freshly cut wood was wonderful. The weather, which could have been a big spoiler was just right, not too hot or cold and above all, dry.

The decking was bright, clean and almost white in colour. This contrasted well with the deep hue of the slate. The water feature, originally intended as a polythene lined pond was revised, after a frantic trip to the DIY store for more decking nails, to an ex- display moulded plastic surround into which sat a submersible pump under a lid which the children dressed with our collection of stones gathered from family holiday trips. The sleepers, dragged into position finished off the whole thing nicely. The pump and fountain actually spouted into action on the first almost ceremonial switch on. We all cheered.

Standing back, we were all proud of our hard work, Even my neighbour, himself a very able and accomplished domestic craftsman, gave a just perceptible nod of approval as he was watering his Azaleas at the joint boundary fence.

On my wife's return we played it cool. "No, we had not done much." "It had been a lazy Dad and kids time",
"The children had the splinters, abrasions and lacerations before you went away"." Yes, there does appear to be a spillage of slate bits under the badly parked car". "No, we haven't seen the dogs for a couple of days".

Whether a combination of travel fatigue, the emotion of seeing Michaelangelo's David in the Galleria dell Accademia , the beautiful sights of Florence or our completed project my wife did have tears in her eyes as she stood in the doorway and looked out down the grden.