Deck framing begins!

I had a crew of 10 come work on my deck today. There was a lot of measuring, squaring, leveling, and cutting to be done! And hammering! There were some master-hammerers putting together beams today. The beams needed assembling because three of them had to be made of two 2x8s and one had to be made of three 2x8s. There was some muscle-building because the lumber was in the driveway, so my great friends hauled everything to the backyard.
We cheered when things were leveled and spent plenty of time over-analyzing the next steps. And, of course, there was the obligatory trip to the hardware store to pick up extra items (so grateful to my friends who were willing to run that errand for me).
My shady backyard kept us cool enough, but we welcomed the occasional breeze and there was plenty of water (and sangria) to go around. Once we got to this point:

we went inside to have some tacos, ceviche, snickerdoodles, and more sangria. A great day and lots of progress!