Vague Outlines
When everything was said and done, the building appeared to be a sketchy outline of something that was beginning to take form. The man had inserted a beam into each of the holes, and he had also fastened the first few steps of what might have been a staircase to the beams he had inserted.
The neighbors got the last piece of information they needed when they saw the outline of the stairs, and that’s when they realized the man had been working on building a deck for his pool. It would be much simpler for him and his family to unwind by the pool in the summer if they had a deck to sit on instead of just sitting on the grass.