I'm recovering nicely from last weekend's deck building exercise at my son's north Wisconsin cabin. With the good advice from you guys, we decided to build it on piers rather than attach to the cabin. This necessitated 18 notched posts sunk to 42 inches. We reserved a one-man auger but when we went to pick it up the shop jock couldn't get it started. Found a towable Little Beaver auger at the only other building goods store in town. When we got it to the site, discovered that the trigger that allows the bit to move to verticle was broken and spent a half hour futzing with it until we were able to put the bit in a usable position.

Never used one of these before so there was a bit of a learning curve, but we sunk the posts, secured them with Quikrete. Everything checked out level and square.

Had Menard's deliver the lumber -- 2x10s. Some 10s, some 16s and some 20s. They did get it relatively close to the construction zone, but man those long ones are heavy.

We're building about 400 sf. Finished the joist work on half of it and laid some temporary decking. Son is pleased and I may be off the hook for part 2, now that he knows what to do.

As for me, I'm going back to turning and small box work.

Larry