Good Enough is Good Enough

6:07 AM Elizabeth Seckman 37 Comments

My husband can't do anything by halves. Every chore, every task is accompanied by worry and anxiety to reach whatever high standard he has set in his head as his success point.

Take our deck, for example. Thirteen years ago, we decided to build one on the back of our house. My husband wanted it to be sturdy enough to take the abuse of four active boys.

I bet you're thinking that's just smart, not exactly overkill.

To better explain, I did some googling of carpenter sites.

These sites recommended setting floor joists 2 to 2.5 feet apart. Ours are 1 foot. Okay, so with the joists that close together, we could have easily used 2x4's on the top. Instead, we used 2x6's.

To anchor our deck to the house, my husband special ordered lag bolts so big the guy at the hardware store thought we were building a second-story deck instead of a ground-level deck on posts set in enough concrete to pave a driveway.

My oldest brother looked over the progress and asked if Chad was building it sturdy enough to break down transmissions on it. My other brother, the polite optimist, suggested if we ever wanted to add onto our house, the deck was a solid enough foundation to go two stories high.

Okay, so that was all well and good. There's no harm in building a deck solid enough to march elephants across it. The argument started with the top deck boards. I told him to just lay the boards and screw them down.

Good enough is good enough. Unless you're Chad Seckman. He worried: if the boards aren't tight enough together, they would shrink and be gapped too far apart. That worked for me- easier to sweep the dirt off.

At his insistence, every board was laid with painstaking care with Chad prying on each and every board with a crow bar to keep them tight while the boys and I screwed them down.

The result? Deck boards so close together he had a new worry. There were no gaps in the deck boards, so it couldn't drain.

We could have used the deck for hydroponic gardening...

His new deck was destined for rot.

He wanted to take up every board and redo it. The boys were about ready to hang him. They were tired of the deck building process. (Did I mention we had to dig out several thousand pounds of dirt and haul it away before we even began the building process?)

I insisted we leave it. When and if a board rotted, he could take them all up and reset them.

This year, we finally had a spongy board, so he got the green light to rip up all the boards and reset them. So, over the weekend he and two of the boys basically rebuilt the top of the deck. (The underside is still solid as a rock, if you were wondering.) It's now perfect, because he measured the gap between each board. They're all equal distance apart.

 A thirteen-year worry off his plate.

Once the boards were moved, we had 6 boards to spare.

If only he'd have listened to me thirteen years ago and left the crow bar in the basement....

That was officially my last "I told you so".


On the writing front...



I've been trying to study marketing. Ugh, I know. I was reading a post on social media content and it was suggested a writer offer 90% information and fun, 10% "buy my books" posts. Only hitting social media when it's time to sell is a no-no (duh, how rude, right?), but we also make the mistake of not mentioning our books at all. I'm totally guilty of that. Even my own children don't know how many books I've had published (7 if you're wondering).

It's hard, right? We don't want to be pains in the butt, but we also don't want to be our own worst enemies.

So, for this week, here is the marketing portion of the post:

Might I suggest Defying Reason? It's a summer romance told in an alternating POV. I had the most fun switching from her view to his. It was a great opportunity to do a he said, she said story. Spoiler alert! They don't all often see things the same way.

Buy it Here!