Tile be gone!

After the first day of work, this is what the deck looks like. The tile and mortar are gone. Two men took two hours to do the job. They used hand-held jackhammers that looked like giant drills. Instead of cylindrical bits, the "drills" had flat hammer-heads that got under the old tiles. They peeled off the deck as if they were banana skins.

The deck's original surface, much as we found it in 2003 after we removed the AstroTurf (yikes!) and several grungy tarps.

The yellow thing is the power washer.

You might notice that the bulky brown shutters on either side of the sliding glass door are gone. We haven't used them since that door was installed, so away they went. I plan to replace them with a white automatic roll-down shutter at some point after the deck work is done.

Yesterday's rain kept the contractor away. I don't think he'll be back today given that it's supposed to be showery off and on. The forecast is for high pressure to build back in over the weekend, so we'll see what happens. I spent the day sweeping water off the deck because it kept flowing toward the house (the reason we're re-doing the deck in the first place), puddling, and dripping through cracks into the garage below.