Ep 140: Everybody Loves Redwood

The episode kicks off with Ross revealing he is a devoted fan of Phil Rosenthal, the creator of Everybody Loves Raymond, who now hosts a food travel show on Netflix called Somebody Feed Phil. Ross has personally visited around 15 of the restaurants the show featured, which is either very impressive or the most expensive hobby a woodworking podcast host has ever admitted to on air. Jess loves the show too, mostly because she cannot figure out how the man stays thin eating like that. Ross explains Phil only takes a bite and hands the rest to the crew, which is the most polite thing anyone has ever done at a Michelin-starred restaurant and a taco truck back to back.

From there the three of them do what any group of close friends does when the mics are hot and nobody has stopped them, which is spend a solid chunk of time ranking summer fruit. Jess is pushing enormous Walmart grapes nearly two inches across that basically look like plums. Colton is a mango guy who cuts them like an avocado and eats them off the grid. Ross wants dark plums all the way through, loves end-of-summer strawberries and Georgia peaches but peels them because the fuzz is a dealbreaker. Jess eats the entire kiwi including the skin. Ross does not like watermelon. This is treated as breaking news.

The real meat of the episode is Colton's deck. He wants to build a 38-foot wide covered back deck on his 1945 farmhouse and came with some ideas, some of which were fine and some of which made Jess say the words "way too thin" with an energy suggesting Colton had proposed framing an aircraft carrier with toothpicks. Two-by-sixes for the floor joists are out. Minimum two-by-tens, go with twelves if spanning 16 feet, and nobody uses four-by-four posts to hold up a roof at 12-foot height unless they enjoy watching things bow slowly over time. Jess advocates hard for at least a 24-inch roof overhang to protect the deck from sun damage, which apparently kills wood faster than water does. The pressure-treated lumber debate gets thorough, covering ground contact versus outdoor rated, copper-based treatments, and whether you need to seal every cut end. Ross strongly recommends filming all of it because outdoor build content crushes every other category on YouTube and TikTok and Colton is leaving serious views on the table.

The back half belongs to a trivia game Jess built from scratch where every country has a national tree and most of them are trees these three have never heard of. Countries like Bhutan, Laos, Guyana, Botswana, and Papua New Guinea get their trees identified one by one while Ross and Colton guess the Janka hardness rating and are wrong almost every single time. African Blackwood from Tanzania sinks in water and was historically used as bearings on boats. Mopane from Zambia rates around 3000 Janka and will destroy your planer blades. The Marula tree from Mozambique produces fruit that ferments on the ground and has been documented getting elephants genuinely drunk. Frangipani from Laos rates under 500, which Jess describes as one you could fart on and dent it. The national food trivia woven in is equally unhinged, including larb from Laos, blood sausage with lingonberry jam from Estonia, and a Uruguayan dish Colton identifies from personal West Texas experience as requiring a full week of recovery after eating.

Ross closes with a nugget about threaded insert bolts for table bases, Colton finally committed to SketchUp and recommends the Sketchup Essentials YouTube channel, and Jess says use YouTube for every tool purchase decision you ever make and also just buy the good drill the first time.

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Beat Around the Bench is a woodworking, DIY, and general nonsense podcast hosted by Jess of Jess Build It, Colton of Cold Crit, and Ross of R&C Woodworking and Designs. Find them on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Patreon.