Deck done

So I left early from work once again yesterday because the painters were coming to finish the deck.  I had to laugh to myself when I got another text from the guy saying they were running late.  They got to the house maybe a half hour to 45 minutes before I did, they started somewhere around 2.  I was annoyed and concerned that they would not have time to finally finish.

When I got there Giovanni was hand painting the outer border of the deck, no paint was on the large areas yet.  The color that was down looked good at least.  The dogs, whom I picked up on the way home were quite vocal in their disapproval of the painters, barking at them out the slider.  Sadie was not at all happy that her dog door was blocked.

I attended to stuff inside as the work progressed.  Once the border was outlined they used a roller on a long pole to do the big areas.  It didn’t take them long at all to roll on the two coats even though they went through 4 gallons of paint.  They were finished up by 5.

I asked Giovanni how long until I could walk on it.  He said pretty much right away since the bright sun dried the paint very quickly.  When I ventured out on the deck after he left, barefoot, I discovered that was not totally true as I wound up with some wet paint on my feet.

I walked around the outside of the pool cage checking out the end result.  The color looked good and the patching and painting of the various cracks seems to have made them disappear.  Tonight I will take a closer look after work as I start to bring the stuff that has been sitting in the yard for a week back inside.

Although the frustration I had to deal with getting the deck painted were very annoying I am pleased with the end result which is the most important. You can all the pics from the project I took here.

Yesterday on the way to work I saw a dead German Shepherd on the side of the road.  Instantly I felt a wave of sadness come over me.  I hope whomever hit the dog has a huge serving of bad karma to feast on for a long, long time. Idiot…

So I have my Yamaha surround system pretty much set up the way I want it although the age of my TV makes certain things not possible.  I programmed my Harmony Remote to automatically incorporate the Yamaha receiver whenever anything tv related is going on with just one click.  When I change volume on the Harmony, it changes the volume on the surround sound.  This is the functionality I always wanted with my Bose Lifestyle but was unable to do so because of the RF style remote the system uses.

There is another feature of my Mitsubishi tv that annoys me, the way it handles AV inputs.  The tv boasts “smart sensing” of devices attached to the various HDMI and component connections.  If you connect something to a port it will detect it and ask you what kind of device it is.  Well for whatever reason it isn’t smart enough to detect the HDMI output from the Yamaha receiver which would allow me to navigate the AV menu system on the tv.

Well if the TV doesn’t smart detect an input it won’t allow you to flip to it which is asinine.  So if I want to view the Yamaha menu on screen I have to “trick” the tv by temporarily plugging the HDMI cable from the surround system into one of the detected ports.  Of course if the tv was a few years newer this would be a moot issue because I could utilize ARC and HDMI device control where all my HDMI capable devices would go into the Yamaha box and everything to the tv would be fed from a single HDMI cable.