It's a start

Wednesday was supposed to be very productive. It wasn't supposed to rain. I kept expecting it to stop, but it dripped on until 11am or so. Then I was added to an hour-long meeting at 2pm that bumped into my regular 3pm, which was followed by a 4pm with a guy in Sydney (it was 9am Thursday for him).

Trying to cut the "picture frame," I was reminded of a wrestler stalking his opponent--you need to know where to grab first and to anticipate how you expect the match to go. Strength isn't most of it, I gather. The hard part is visualizing how you'll get your arms around the problem.

I'm not an expert, but I have watched a lot of YouTube videos.—Seen on a t-shirt on a YouTube video.

The boards are slippery under power tools and you can't mark them with a pencil.

The frame overlaps the 2x structure, so the mitered corners meet in mid-air. Where the deck thrusts out at a 14° angle, the miter is 52°, not 45°. So, you just hold the tape measure at a point in mid-air, right? The bigger problem is notching for the 4x4 posts. I'm an amateur with the jigsaw.

Turns out its an orbital up-cut jigsaw, which means that the blade goes forward and back as it goes up and down and it cuts when the blade goes up, which tends to keep the tool on the wood. You can see my amateurish first cuts. I got better, first by watching a lot of YouTube videos and then by buying a longer, finer-toothed plastic blade. The general-purpose blade that came with the tool wasn't...wait for it...cutting it.

I sacrificed the board shown above and just used it as a template. I didn't get much done for the day, but tomorrow should be better.

Just two more frame boards (the longest two, with 3 notches each) to go.