MAYNARDVILLE — Delbert Coker, 73, has replaced the front step of his house off Maynardville Highway eleven times since 1985, and every board that has come off is still there, nailed in under the one that replaced it.
“You never know when you’ll want a board,” Coker said. “That one in the middle, from about ’97, was a good board. It had a knot, but it was a good board. It just went soft on the end where the gutter drips.”
Each new board goes on top of the old one and is nailed down through it, so the step has climbed about an inch every time. It used to sit fourteen inches below the porch floor and now sits about three. The screen door opens outward over the step and had started catching on the top board, and Coker has planed the bottom of the door twice.
His wife, Louise, who uses the back door, said she has been on the front step twice since the first one, both times for a photograph.
The lumberyard in Maynardville keeps his measurement on a card behind the counter, forty inches by nine and a quarter, and gives him a repeat-customer discount of five percent. Terry Bales, who has worked the counter there for twenty years, said Coker comes in about every four years. “We’ll cut it before he gets here if we remember,” Bales said. “Sometimes we don’t, and he stands there and tells us about the porch.”
The top board looks fine right now, Coker said.