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another thing to watch out for when buying deck screws
Tuesday, August 18 2026
After a fairly short walk with Charlotte down part of the Gulleys Trail and then back on the Stick Trail, I drove out to the brick mansion on Downs Street to be there for a lead paint inspection. The Kingston government recently developed a policy for inspecting every multi-family residence for lead paint, which (as you probably know) is bad if it finds its way into most organisms. Babies supposedly like chips of lead paint because it has a sweet taste. But then they grow up to be avid viewers of Fox News. Nobody wants that!
I brought my small, unloved GreenWorks battery-powered chainsaw and a pair of pruning shears inherited from my mother and immediately set to work cutting down all the tree of heaven and catalpa sprouts trying to form trees from around the foundation of the 150 year old building. There were dozens or perhaps even hundreds of mature spotted lantern flies just in these sprouts, so there was no telling how many were in the mature tree in the back yard. As I did these things, a Nissan Leaf with a City of Kingston emblem on the door drove up and four (I think) caucasoid young people with clipboards clambered out. One of was a thin man who seemed to be the leader, and the others were plump women. It seemed like a lot of manpower to do an inspection, but I didn't design this inspection protocol.
First thing, I took them up to the attic apartment, which always blows people's minds. Nobody was there, but I'd brought my landlord keys. "Wow, this is an amazing apartment," one of them said. They then fanned out to do what their respective tasks. One used graph paper to draw a crude map of the apartment, while others used paper to pick up sample residue from the floor. The skinny guy had a fancy battery-powered device he pushed against surfaces and then called out numbers, most of which were "0.0." I asked if it was a spectrometer and he said yes, though he also said it used x-rays and could detect lead as much as an eighth of an inch from the surface. But if the paint was in good shape, that wasn't a problem.
We came down a floor and I knocked on the door to the second floor apartment. A very bleary-eyed not-entirely-dressed tenant answered the door, and I said that this was the lead inspection and that Gretchen had sent an message about it. The tenant said she hadn't received any email, making me wonder if that message actually had been sent. (Later I would learn that Gretchen's messages to the tenants in the Downs Street brick mansion had been going to the tenant's husband, but he died a few years ago of cancer in his upper spine, and his survivor hadn't been added to the list.) Fortunately, this second inspection went faster than the first. There was a cute white cat with a cloud of faint grey at the top of her head there named Turtle, and today was her sixteenth birthday. She was friendly. When the lead inspectors said how nice and clean the apartment was, the tenant mentioned that there was a chicken living in one of the the apartments. The inspectors were intrigued, though one of the plump ladies tried to make a funny, saying, "I like chicken."
The next apartment we inspected was the one with the chicken, a special-needs bird with one leg going off an unhelpful angle. There is also a special-needs dog there with two paralyzed hind legs who gets around with the help of a scooter. This tenant said they (that's the pronoun) had gotten Gretchen's message but had forgotten about it. Otherwise the apartment would've been cleaner. That said, it looked perfectly clean to me.
The last apartment to be inspected was the one with the tenant we'd tried to evict in the past for not paying her rent back before we knew how impossible it is to evict tenants in the City of Kingston these days. Lately she's been good about paying her rent, so we've sort of forgotten about her. She wasn't there, so I let us in to her apartment. The last time I was in there, it was looking like maybe a level-two hoarder situation. Today it was more like level-3, with a swath of clutter with paths through it, which was the end-stage of hoarding at my childhood home when my mother finally moved into the trailer across the street. Tellingly, there were boxes of take-out food (one from Kennedy Fried Chicken) just left on top of things, as if the motivation even to throw away things that are clearly trash does not exist. (To the extent I am a hoarder, it is only of things that I know potentially have value.) "At least it doesn't smell," I said to the lead inspectors as they fanned out to do their thing.
I continued my jihad against tree of heaven and catalpa sprouts on the side of the mansion while they continued their lead inspection in the central hallways. They did find some obviously cracking (like drying mud) paint that contained lead around the exterior windows that I will probably have to do something about, but otherwise it went well. I was stuffing all cut-off tree sprouts in the back of the Chevy Bolt when the inspectors were about to leave, and the head inspector said something about being "brave," perhaps in reference to all the lantern flies.
On the drive home, I actually considered dumping all that plant debris somewhere else. But then I figured that if I dumped it in the place I always dump it (on the west side of our driveway about 20 feet in from the road), the lantern flies will probably find themselves in an unsuitable habitat and be gobbled up by the local insectivores. So that was where it all ended up.
I came into the house all hot and sweaty and stinking of tree of heaven and told Gretchen how things had gone. Evidently things weren't going great with her march to end animal testing, because she then asked me for an accounting of the things that are on my plate. I mentioned working on A's radiator yesterday and the things that still need doing on the south deck. Gretchen then asked me if it could be my "job" to work on the deck and a few other projects, particular a car port that she wants me to build. I took offense at her tone, which suggested she thought I was being lazy. I said this, and she didn't disagree. I didn't tell her that her tendency to order me around had experienced an uptick ever since she became something of an executive in her nascent animal testing organization, but I definitely felt it. The upshot of all this was that I didn't like her ordering me around, especially the moment I come home from a hot and sweaty job. She said something about there never being a good time to discuss these things, and I more or less said I was tired of arguing about the matter, and then I charged upstairs. We didn't really speak much for the rest of the day, but the freeze thawed somewhat by the time evening came around.
I did intend to work on the south deck at some point, though I didn't really want to give Gretchen the satisfaction of her complaining about my laziness immediately manifesting in me doing chores. But with Gretchen wrapped up in meetings all day, ostensibly able to keep an eye on Neville to make sure he didn't wander off, it was easy for me to work on the deck. So I began by processing the balusters from the old south rail of the deck, whose structural parts I had completely replaced. Thos balusters were still good, especially since my new application of them required that they be 34 inches long instead of the 42 inches of the old application (when they had to reach all the way down to the rim joist). The way I was doing things now, they only had to reach down to a two by four whose bottom was 3.5 inches above the deck's top surface. To help me with chopping off the ends of the old balusters, I brought out my trusty Delta power mitre saw, which I've been using now for over 20 years with the same blade it came with, and began cutting down the old balusters. (Today I only managed to cut through one old screw!) As I worked, I realized I would need about 20 additional balusters, as the spacing of the old ones had been too sparse to be code-compliant. I also needed 2.5 inch deck screws to attach them (the three inchers I had were a bit too long). This was what caused me to drive out to Lowes early this afternoon.
Lowes has two kinds of deck balusters: the 42 inch kind I'd just been cutting down and 36 inch ones with 45 degree cuts (some on one end, others on both ends). I figured out I could cut the bevel off both ends of a 36 inch baluster and have the 34 inch baluster I needed. So I bought 40 of them, with the intention of using any leftover to put balusters on a deck without them up at the Adirondack cabin. I also bought a 24 dollar box of deck screws and a five gallon bucket of roof asphalt (that last item was only $50).
Back home on Hurley Mountain, I opened up that box of deck screws only to discover it was segmented into four sections, each with a different sized screw. I'd thought I was buying a box with screws of all the same size, since that's how screws had traditionally been sold. It wasn't in the range of possibilities that the box would only have a fraction of its contents be the size I needed; I'd seen the size on the box and added it to my cart (physical cart in this case). Now I was realizing I'd just bought a box of screws where only a quarter of them were the size I wanted. This means there is yet another thing I need to look for when buying deck screws in addition to the length, type of bit, compatibility with treated lumber, and presence of a self-tapping tip: whether or not the box contains a mix of different-length screws! Initially I had an impulse to close up the box and take it back, but that was going to be a lot of trouble when I just wanted to put up the fucking balusters and it probably had enough screws of the right size to do that. So I grumbled and went to work. Soon enough, though, I discovered that the torx bit on my drill was a little too small and I couldn't find the proper one in my collection of torx bits. This meant I was going to have to root around in that divided box to find the "free" torx bit it was advertised to contain. But since it wasn't on the surface, I was forced to dump out the contents of the box on the floor, completely scrambling the longer screws among the shorter screws. What a disaster! I was so incensed that I thought I should send Deckforce (the company responsible) a irate message of some sort. Despite all that, I was able to cut and install all the old balusters and then cut off the bevels of nine new balusters, thereby completing the south rail rebuild of the south deck.
I should mention that part of what powered me through this job despite my annoyance at Gretchen and the mosquitoes (which were bad) was a recreational 150mg dose of pseudoephedrine.
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