"Could 44 12' planks fit in Daddy's Honda Element? ... Well, if my car is this wide across... Daddy's would... maybe... Nah, no way."
I promised myself that I would be super conscientious about getting work done before having friends over, but making new friends makes keeping focus less easy. It's ok though, i've been doing pretty well.
Ordering the wood for the platform was complicated (for several reasons)...
1. I wanted to order wood that had been used already: discarded, reclaimed or rescued. I expected there to be some kind of surplus center in the Hamptons (what with the prodigious levels of construction out here, even during a recession), somewhere where we could find cheap material left over from the construction site. I sent out a few (unanswered) emails to people I thought would know about that, and according to Orlando, there really isn't one to speak of out here, it's more catch as catch can if you want some discarded lumber or something.
2. I discovered (after ordering about 46 pieces of reclaimed pine from a lumberyard in Brooklyn, which cost me $640.00 plus the cost of the Budget truck we rented), that Karen and Orlando had worked out an alternative floor plan for the tent, using materials they could buy at home depot that would cost under $150. (You can imagine my delight at this revelation.) The miscommunications began at the very outset since we had started out using the wrong blueprint, which didn't include an extended deck, so Orlando had a different picture of our tent in his mind. Together, they mapped out a floor plan that called for a fraction of the wood the blueprint demanded. (They did not tell me about this new plan.) We were going to have to buy materials for the whole platform anyway, and we had discussed using large, wide plywood instead of planks. But when I called the tent company, the guy I spoke to said we couldn't use plywood that big for the deck, because it would collect pools of water whenever it rained, and you run a similar risk by using it on the interior. Hearing this, I decided to just take matters into my own hands, because everyone was depending on me to get supplies. So I looked on the Home Depot website, and got prices for cheap, southern pine decking, and what I found that day added up to more than the cost for the reclaimed pine at M. Fine's lumberyard, or nearly the same price (1$/foot). (Again, this was not wood for an alternative deck, this is wood like what they call for on the blueprint, and enough to cover a 16' x 24' area.)
3. Getting the order shipped would have cost an extra $250.00, so my dad and I had to drive down there in a big budget truck to pick it all up, (about a 5 hour drive).
4. Getting all the nails and screws and little pieces of metal still attached to the wood from its previous job removed would have doubled the entire order cost, so instead we had to spend all the time we had yesterday afternoon hammering away with crowbars and screwdrivers at thousands of rusty nails protruding from the edges of the boards.
So this, below, has some semblance of what the inside of our tent will look like when we're all finished. Pretty nice, right? Compared to a rickity plywood floor, we'll have a really nice hardwood deck. I mean, in the end, it's no comparison. The effort involve just increases the value and beauty. I wonder where the used pine came from originally... and also what it was used for until it was reclaimed.
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