Summer vacation well spent: How me and H built a terrace

Our summer house on the paradise island I told you about is located really close to the seaside, which also means the terrain surrounding the house is good old sand. Not that anyone’s complaining about the two-minute walk to the beach, it would just be nice to go outside and not drag along a ton of sand on your way back in. So I put the idea out there: we should have a terrace. I though maybe next year we could get someone to come build it for us, but H had other plans. “Why can’t we build it ourselves?”, he asked. I didn’t want to undermine his confidence, but I was pretty sure it would be a bit more difficult than that. I agreed that we could at least find out where to get the material and how much it would cost and H went off to ask our neighbor (he’s a local entrepreneur and we assumed if anyone knew, it had to be him). Little did I know he’d return a half an hour later with all the materials needed for a third of the price we had planned. Apparently our neighbor had it all ‘lying around’.About a third of all the building materials we needed and got.

I didn’t have much choice but to get cracking! We didn’t have all the proper tools to our advantage so while H was doing the measurements, I grabbed a handsaw and got to work – I started with a pile of 35 boards (plus the thick beams for the framing, H helped me with those), which at first seemed like a frustrating task (not to mention never-ending) but it actually went really fast!
H (with some assistance from my little sister) put the framing together, me and the baby supervised.
The wooden boards weren’t imbued so they needed proper surfacing. Here: my little sister making sure the framing survives until next year.
The framing was done so it was time to first lift it up on proper Fibo-blocks and then attach the ‘floorboards’

At this point it still needed a lot of sanding because the boards came to us pretty much straight out of the sawmill. We soon found that sanding by hand wasn’t an option if we wanted to be able to actually walk on our terrace (or ever engage in any activities other than sanding until we pass out and die). H went over to our neighbor’s again to see if he had a sander. He didn’t, but he had an electric wood planer. Then we had another setback: baby was scared out of her mind of the noise the planer made.
Solution: we drove to town and had cake & coffee until H was done with the scary machinery.

The whole brigade of our summer camp each grabbed a brush and started painting to finish the terrace off – it would’ve taken a lifetime if the two of us alone had to do it.
Voilà – “Terrazza Plazza” (can’t remember who gave it the witty name, but I personally think it’s brilliant) at night. Notice the cute little bridge we made to avoid getting our feet sandy! All done – if I didn’t know the two of us (plus our awesome paint-squad) created this, I wouldn’t believe it!

Me and H like to think of this as our second best project (baby being the first one). All of this 3×3 meter awesomeness came together in three to four days. What do you think?