Progress...and a Random Toad

It was a lovely day today, though the black flies are out in full force.  A while ago, I bought one of those hats with the mesh hanging off of it to keep the bugs out - and I'm glad I remembered to bring it with me today!  It's a little stuffy in there, but it was worth it to keep the bugs away from my face - and worse, to keep me from inhaling one occasionally!!

So I went out to my land today with plans to take an inventory of the available lumber, and maybe cut down a few more trees...but I may have gotten a little carried away...

So this is about 8x12 feet; the entire deck needs to be 20 feet wide, so I need to add on a few more sections, lol.  Timothy and I had discussed it last week, and decided to go with a square, since we're novice builders.  It would be nicer to build a circle, but the directions are pretty complicated.  (If there's enough lumber, we might actually do a rectangle, so that I can have a bit of a porch.)  :)  

The single board on the right shows how much wider the back side of the deck needs to be:

I'm pretty pleased.  It seems to be fairly square, considering that I built it, lol.  :P  

Oh!  And one blessing - in a few of the above photos, you'll see a tamper - the thing that has the square metal piece at the bottom of a long handle.  At church yesterday, I was asking if anyone had a tamper I could borrow...and a friend promptly drove to the store and bought me one!  God has definitely placed some very kind, generous people in my path to help with this project!  I used the tamper today, and it works beautifully.

I also had a visitor today...

 

He's got good camouflage!  Can you spot him in the photo below?

Anyway, I hope everyone else had a good Monday too.  :)