Creating Work for Yourself
By: Steve Feinstein
Tags: Home Improvement, Carpentry, DIY, Deck Staining

© 2019 Steve Feinstein. All rights reserved.

We all know what this is like. Yesterday was fine, no complications, no big projects hanging over your head, no particular pressure out of the ordinary.

But then you went and did something. You cleaned out a closet. You set up a spreadsheet for your household expenses. You created a time-event-cost matrix detailing your car’s service history. You alphabetized your album collection. You couldn’t just leave well enough alone, could you?

The problem with doing these kinds of things is that you like the result. It’s a good feeling to be able to view your car’s service status and know exactly what’s been done and when, and what’s due next. It’s nice to be able to quickly locate that Chick Corea album, because it’s reliably and predictably situated to the right of Michael Brecker and to the left of Miles Davis. Since you like the results and derive real, actual day-to-day benefit from having done this, you look around and think, “What other projects need doing?” Why stop now when there are undoubtedly so many additional tasks just waiting to be completed?

Emboldened by a tragically misplaced sense of creativity and initiative, you fall unwittingly into one of life’s great traps: You create work for yourself.

Doing so is fraught with peril and potential landmines that threaten your daily routine:

- You may easily become obsessed with thoughts on the best design or method to execute your new plan. Your mind wanders during the day. You don’t pay proper attention to conversations. You forget about other responsibilities. You spend far too much time during the day on the Staples or Home Depot websites. “Hon, I’m gonna be late. I’m stopping off on the way home…..”

- Your spouse/roommate/partner doesn’t share your enthusiasm nor does he/she see the absolute value from either a time or money standpoint. “You know, for the same amount of effort you’re putting into this, you could be doing something that would be really be helpful like….”

- Perfectly good downtime is gone, absorbed by this new-found project. Time that should be spent relaxing or watching the game or going out on Saturday to look at a new sofa is now unavailable. You’re doing this. No time for anything else.

It’s happened to me. We have a deck off the back of our house. A typical rear deck on our typical suburban colonial house: 16’ x 12’. Pressure treated wood. (We built the house in 2002, before those new-fangled synthetic deck materials became really popular. Pressure-treated wood was all we ever considered.)

It’s held up quite well. I am good about water-proofing it every other year and there has been virtually no serious deterioration. I haven’t had to replace even a single board due to rot or excessive weakening/splitting.

We had toyed around with the idea of screening it in so it would be usable on summer nights without the nuisance of mosquitos. We’re fortunate to know a good all-around handyman who can do such work, so we asked Bob to come over for a look.

Bob’s a great guy. (He’s a “talker,” but he’s a great guy. Incredibly knowledgeable and experienced. Just don’t ask him any open-ended questions.) He’s one of those “old school” people who can do anything and everything really well — carpentry, painting, electrical work, plumbing, roofing, you name it. He looks at the existing deck and says, “Why just screen it in? I can make this a real 3-season room for very little more than the cost of just enclosing it and you’d have a nice additional living space.”

So we tossed some ideas back and forth and settled on this: He’d enclose 12 x 12 into a 3-season room and leave a 4 x 12 swath of deck as an outside area. We’d be able to put a clothes rack outside or someone would be able to sit out and sunbathe, whatever. 12 x 12 is a nice-sized extra room. We’d install a ceiling fan and dimmable light fixture and the windows would be sliding glass over screens. Bob would put two electrical outlets on opposite walls, for a radio or TV, and he’d insulate the exterior walls so if we used a portable heater, the room would warm up in short order, even in the dead of winter.

We did the room in 2012. The room itself came out great, just as we knew it would. The subfloor (beneath the insulated flooring he put in) is the original deck.

So it’s really important that the 4’ exposed section of pressure-treated deck stays in good shape, because it’s the basis of the 3-season room. Can’t let it go bad.

Even though I’ve continued to waterproof the exposed 4’ section of deck, at this point it’s 17 years old and some of the planks have developed weather-caused splits. Nothing catastrophic, but there they are. I wish they weren’t there. It would be great if there was something I could do…….

Weather-caused split

Well, there is, and I did. I created work for myself. Rewind to mid-summer, this past June/July. As some of you remember, I built this “fort” for our grandkids in the far reaches of our backyard, a raised platform where they could play, hide out, etc. Perfect for them and the neighborhood kids, all between the ages of 5 and 9. There was one minor operation that required a little exterior wood glue. Elmer’s — even Elmer’s Carpenter Glue — is only meant for interior use; it’s not waterproof.

The “Fort” July 2019

So I went to Home Depot. There, I discovered Titebond wood glue, in three flavors: regular interior glue, Titebond II, which is listed as interior/exterior “water resistant,” and Titebond III, which is listed as exterior/interior “waterproof” (note for III, the “exterior” is cited first). For the fort, a minor trim non-structural use situation, I bought Titebond II. It was perfect.

I don’t know how the thought came to me, but it struck me that I could use Titebond III to fill in the cracks and gaps on the deck planks and extend their life pretty much indefinitely. So I bought a big bottle of III and poured it onto the cracks. It has the consistency of Elmer’s. Using a flexible 2-inch wide flat-blade spackle knife, I troweled the thick, viscous glue into the cracks of the boards, filling the voids completely. Titebond III dries to an opaque clear-beige color, so it’s visually innocuous and doesn’t call attention to itself.

Splits filled with waterproof wood glue

Wow. Worked like a charm. It rained the other night and the water is just beading up like crazy, as if the treated areas of the boards are made of plastic. Totally waterproof and identical in appearance to the way they were before. Now I want to do the entire exposed surface of the deck, not merely the larger cracks. I figure if I can fill in every crack and split — no matter how small — the deck will last pretty much forever and the structural integrity of the 3-season room’s floor will never be in question. A 16 oz. bottle of Titebond III is $7.97. Three bottles should do the whole job. 25 bucks to protect the entire deck for the rest of eternity? Sold.

This project didn’t exist last week. But today, it seems absolutely critical. Such is the nature of self-created work.