An Attached Pergola for Dummies

Pergola with wall-mounted ledger

You gotta love some of the recession-era eHow.com freelancers, not to mention their alleged "content editors." We mean really: some of them were perfectly happy to reinterpret any topic they didn't understand into something they (thought) they could handle, and the CEs (as "contributors" called them)  were perfectly happy to let them get away with it, mostly because they didn't understand the questions, either. That's where today's nominee, Tracy Morris, went: she was supposed to tell people "How to Build an Attached 16 X 20 Pergola''¹ at HomeSteady.com, but did she? In a word, "Hell, no."

We were pretty suspicious of Morris right away, based on the three references she claimed: one was for a freestanding 8 by 8 pergola, another was an order form for a pergola kit. Really? And then there were these lines in the materials list:

• "2 redwood cedar boards, 4X4 inches each"
• "11 cedar boards, 2X4 inches each"
• "Hurdle"

Tracy's crap about "4X4 inches each" is bad enough, but WTF is "redwood cedar"? That's not to mention the whole "hurdle" question. Regardless of her lack of familiarity with the nomenclature of lumber (and softwoods), the intrepid freelancer forged ahead; providing such scintillating prose as,

"Tie the mason line to a hurdle, and place the hurdle so that the mason’s line aligns with the L square. Repeat this process for the other side of the pergola. Tie a mason’s line to two more hurdles, and place them at the 20-foot point at the end of the pergola."

It turns out that Tracy cribbed some plans from an Australian website, and in Oz a "hurdle" is what we call batter boards here in the Americas. Whodathunkit? Anyway, Morris continued to soldier on with her dimensionless plans. Unfortunately, she didn't understand the section of those Australian plans that said,

"Fasten ledger beam to existing house structure at correct beam height..."

...so Tracy rendered this as,

"...cut three of your cedar boards so that they are 16 inches wide. Attach one of your boards to the side of your home as an anchor board using a hammer and nails."

Ri-i-i-i-ight... this is an "expert" who used 52 words to tell you how to lay out the corner posts, but that's all she has to say about attaching the pergola to the house? And she thinks a 16 x 20 pergola is "16 inches wide"? Really??? What a maroon...

This is pretty much the sort of "helpful" advice that permeated eHow in the bad old days. Thankfully, someone is slowly cleaning up the dross at HomeSteady. With any luck, the rubbish that earned Morris a Dumbass of the Day award will be gone just a few weeks after we issue her award. We'll check back in a few months...

¹ ...and, we were right: the original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   homesteady.com/12298226/how-to-build-an-attached-16-x-20-pergola

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