Wanna Know Something?

Crying doesn't change the cost of building a deck. Neither does pouting. I had a meeting with our architects this morning and I cried (mostly unnoticed) but that didn't change the fact that the deck we want to build off the back of our house will cost $37,000 (yes, that's thousand) before we even get to the above ground part. No kidding. That's just for the foundations, pilings, cement and all the crap that will never see the light of day. $37,000!!!! So now we have to eliminate the part of the deck that I was most looking forward to. The part that goes all the way across the back of our house so I can step out from any upstairs room and be outdoors, enjoying our lovely view. We'll have a deck off our kitchen but it won't be sweeping and grand and I won't be able to fit a long table to seat twelve people on it. My entire vision of the future of our deck has been ruined. Bahhhhaaahaaa!

And you wanna know something else? The city of Los Angeles is determined to make our deck as plain and ugly as possible. They won't approve our railings, which were going to be really cool. And they keep asking for more money. And I'm wondering who exactly at the city permit office I need to sleep with (sorry Warren) in order to get our permits approved in a timely fashion without all these inane restrictions. Ughhhhhh!

See. This is what the deck was going to look like. This is a preliminary drawing without the cool railing so you just have to imagine a railing going all the way across the house just above that beam.

But now that entire section on the left has got to go (unless we discover $50,000 that we didn't know we had), so it's really just going to be the small upper deck with the stairs and then the lower deck, which comes off our bedroom downstairs (that's the part where you can see those orange curtains).

I know. I know. It's only a stupid deck. It's not important in the grand scheme of things. I'm going to New Zealand for three months for crying out loud would I just stop wallowing in self-pity. I know. But I'm not ready yet. Maybe I'll be ready to stop wallowing in an hour or so. For now I'm mourning the loss of my stupid deck.