Installing a Deck?

Kathy's been thinking of putting a deck in the back yard. (that is, getting me to put a deck in the back yard.)

The past weekend, we got our air conditioner condenser moved from the back yard into an ideal sheltered spot in the front, so we've freed up a good size chunk of space in the back. The backyard is a nice, regular shape that would easily fit a nice deck. I wonder how much of the yard I should cover with the deck?

The only thing that worries me a bit is how stable the ground is in the backyard. It tends to be a bit on the muddy side, to be honest, the drainage there isn't that great. Our patio stones there shift pretty drastically in the winter time and spring time. I've been wondering about how I can improve the way the water drains away from our backyard, and it looks like we will probably have to cut away part of the widened driveway to do it, since that's the direction the water wants to go in. We never really had any problem with the drainage until we widened the driveway, and it looks like that is the culprit. I wonder if it's something I can do myself, or if I'll have to hire someone to do it.

Childproofing our stove

Connor's been a bad boy. Well, a curious one anyways. Recently he's getting curious about the dials on our gas stove, and he's tall enough to reach them and twist them. The existing safety mechanism is a function where you press the knob in a tad before you twist it, but Connor's already able to defeat that by default, the way he reaches up for the dial presses it in already.

So I went online to check out what sort of babyproofing is available for stoves with the controls on the front. I'm surprised by the number of products that only prevent kids from reaching the range top, and not the front dials, happily displaying on their packaging how the kid is prevented from grabbing a pot, where they are totally ignoring the dials right next to their hands. Hmph.

I ended up picking up one of these from ToysRUs, with the intention of mounting it in front of the knobs, but there wasn't enough space to mount it in any spot.

It's probably better to just fence off the whole kitchen area. While I love the open concept kitchen we have, I'm always seeing more reasons why a kitchen cooking area should be a separate room unto itself.

It keep out:

• Curious troublemakers like kids and pets
• Backseat driver types who keep picking at your cooking techniques

It keeps in:

• oily smoke, fumes, and odours - especially when you fry fish.
• noise from the ventilation fans (plus I'm pretty sure an enclosed space makes the ventilation process a lot more efficient)
• excess heat from baking or making soup/stews

In the meantime, we've just detached all the knobs, but its a bit of a pain to have to plug them in each time we want to use the range.

edit - Its March 30th and the knobs are still all detached. We've figured out how to unlock and twist the posts to different positions, so we don't even put the knobs back on all the time. :D

Allen.