Do these things happen to you too?

Sometimes things just don't go our way. We'll start a project and realize we've forgotten something and then spend two hours running back and forth to Home Depot. Or the weather doesn't cooperate. Or we have to work most of weekend and we end up too exhausted for anything else.

We planned to re-build our front steps over Memorial Day weekend. We ripped out the hideous metal pipe railing:

We were excited to find stepping in the extra long length (12 feet!) we needed over at Garber's. We bought it ahead of time and ordered the wood for the risers. Did you know that wood doesn't standardly come in whole inches? They call them 2X4's but they're more like 1.5X 3.5's!
We had to have the riser wood ripped down and slightly trimmed to length. The guy that was supposed to be working in the mill decided to take off for the long weekend early (right after we placed our order) and they called us the next day and said our wood wouldn't be ready until the following Tuesday. Bye bye re-building front steps over Memorial Day weekend plan.
I really want this project to be over - our front steps really suck.
Lots of wear and tear:

General Scuzziness reporting to duty:

Chunks missing:

The new steps were longer than our car:


Can you take a photo with one hand while carrying steps with the other?

Fresh primer:

Long risers:

Now we're all primed and ready to go but we're waiting on my Dad to have a free weekend to help out.

On a positive note, the decaying front porch isn't stopping our new jackmanii clematis: