The Deck

When we bought the house our deck was under feet of snow. But you could tell that it was big enough that we could really have some fun with it. That and the view from there, well, we love it. :D

We came to find out that it was painted with about a rust color of paint. I don't like how it looks with the brick, the paint was peeling all funny, and I just didn't like it. My grand plan was to strip off the paint and stain it. I for some reason had it in my head that stain will protect better than paint. That and I can't imagine stain peeling like the paint has. (Lets hope I am right :D )

So we have talked to people over the past two years, just small talk, about our plan. As people do we got suggestions on how to go about achieving my goal. Notice how I say my goal, apparently Mike was against this, too much work.

Starting about three weeks ago we got plastic putty knives to start scraping off the paint. I was thinking somehow that we could scrape it all off, just so you know it really only works with the already lose paint. The plastic knives were only sort of working. In looking for our painting supplies I came across an old metal one and decided to try it. SO MUCH BETTER! So we promptly went out and got more.

We kept working. My dad came over at one point to help. His statement about all of it? It went something like this, "This is the worst job ever, it is pointless." I do have to admit that he was working in probably the worst area. He was working where the sun hits the deck the least. So it really had the least amount of paint coming up. Sorry dad!

We finally split the deck in close to half. We figured that maybe making the job smaller might make it less daunting. I would come home after work and scrape and scrape. I felt like I was getting a lot of paint up, then I would stand back and take a look at my progress. I don't think I was really doing anything. I was getting frustrated.

That first Saturday Mike and I were going to work on it together. I distracted him with wanting to go yard sale shopping! HAHA! It turned out to be a great idea since we found an electric sander for $7! We promptly went and bought sandpaper and got to work. Why oh why did we try to scrape when sanders exist?!?



I had to stop working on the deck for a week, it rained a lot. So I finally got caught up on my house work. When I could get back to the deck this week I went and bought some more sandpaper. I got a different kind than Mike originally got and decided to try and re-sand some of what he had done. I was able to pull up a lot more paint that he did. It turns out he was basically just buffing the paint instead of stripping it :D So I re-sanded what he had done on Monday. Tuesday morning I painted all of that. So at this point it was about half way done.


Tuesday night Mike started sanding the second half and Wednesday morning and afternoon I got a huge portion of that sanding done.
Mike finished up the sanding as I got home from my cake wrecks party. I really wanted to be done with the project so I talked Mike into staying up and getting the rest of it painted/stained. We started at about 10 pm and finished shortly after midnight.



It only took the two of us two hours. I kind of liked doing it at night. The sun wasn't beating down on it and drying it so fast that it gave it funny lines. That and we weren't having to play whack-a-mole with the kids.


While we were staining last night a ladybug decided to join our party.

But we are very happy to now say that the biggest portion of the deck is finished!!!

It looks slightly odd with some of the paint not having come up but it will look better as we repeat this process for the next couple years.

After all of that I am proud to say that I am no longer hesitant to use a power tool. The only war wounds are:

• a couple paper cut like cuts from the putty knife
• Sun burned the back of my legs
• and slightly stained hands

For me using an electric sander for so long I am really surprised that we didn't damage anything. I am somewhat accident prone.

Next, build a fence. Our neighbor is going to help us and seems amused that I want to help do that. I will show him! (I hope :| )