Put a Price on Sleep

First of all, welcome to my new house:

Yeah, front porch... and you can't see it, but there's a swing on the right. It's pretty cool. It swings and whatnot. Two people could sit on it. It generally has a pretty good view. You can see storm clouds rolling in from the West. The view right now, however, is mostly taken up by this:

There's a construction site down the way. It's full of disgruntled workers that seem to be in a permanent state of semi-on-strike. That's where they wake up super early in the morning and make tons of noise, but still manage to find time to stand on the side of the road with signs that don't explain what they want. While your "Honk for worker's rights!" sign appeals to my desire for a daily recognizable but abstract sense of justice, I don't feel strongly about your cause because I don't know what it is.

So, instead of supporting the workers who make lots of noise really early in the morning despite their confusingly intermittent strike, I decided to fix the main problem with the house. The problem is as follows: three bedrooms, three graduate students, but one of the bedrooms is in the back of the house, which is my room and was probably part of an addition at some point in the house's 105-year history. There are two doors to my bedroom. One is through another bedroom and the other is to the outside (and leads out onto a covered back-patio area). The problem is with the door to the outside. It led out to the patio, but with a two-and-a-half foot drop.

Woodworking project:

Win. Awesome. End of story.

Well, not quite end of story. I enlisted some help from Tyler. So, he deserves proper credit for helping with fixing the stairs into the concrete and reducing wobbliness. Also, I should varnish or paint it.