Pergola Post #1

[Today’s run: 5 miles with Boardtown Runners]

I went to Lowes today and bought some lumber.  Brought it home and unloaded.

Then I got out the post-hole diggers and dug the first post hole for our pergola.

We got the post all plumbed up and true.

Then we mixed and placed 3-1/2  80 lb bags of quickcrete concrete mix.  My son did the mixing and I carried the mix, sprayed in the water and did the shoveling into the hole.  We are a good team.

Our experience on this pergola project  (two sono-tube pillars and this one post, so far) is that it always takes more bags of mix than we think it is going to take.  And it always takes longer and is more exhausting than we thought it was going to be.

I had to stop and sit down a couple of times.  It didn’t help that we were doing it in the afternoon, in 98 degree heat, in Mississippi in early August.  But the weather can’t put a stop to all a guy’s projects, otherwise I’d rarely leave the house.

As of now we have three more posts and one more pillar to do.  After we get one more post in we can put up the two cedar posts on the corresponding pillars and start on the overhead structure.  Then we will have some shade for the rest of the project.