Decked Out

Derrick and I finally had a weekend that didn't include traveling or full day activities so we decided this would be the weekend we started working on the deck. When we bought the house we asked the sellers to replace some damaged wood on the deck. They agreed but in doing so they left 4 pieces of raw wood exposed to the elements and sticking out like sore thumbs.

You can see the one long board (third from the left) here that had been replaced. The two top railing boards were replaced...can't see them in this picture.

 And one board on the stairs was replaced.

So that's what we started with. We don't know if the deck was stained previously or if it was just dirty but we knew that we needed to get something on those raw boards to protect them and figured the entire deck could use a new coat of stain to ensure it was well protected too. Plus, anything new was going to look very different on the old boards compared to the new boards.

So I did some reading, mostly on blogs, and we came up with a game plan. We decided to use these two products:

Basically you use the wood stain and finish stripper first and then you follow it up with the All-in-One wood cleaner. This would get the deck to a state that would be ready for new stain and hopefully look fairly uniform between the old and new boards.

So, that's what we did! We did the stripper on Saturday in the middle of the afternoon. Not a great plan because it was in the 80's and it was difficult to keep the surface of the deck from drying out like the instructions say. Also a bad plan because Derrick was in sweatpants to keep the chemical from burning his skin. Almost effective...he just got 3 tiny burns on his arms.

Derrick rolled the stripper on and I had the hose and misted any dry spots that started to form.

Cros was not happy to be left out but we didn't want those little paws to burn off.

You can kind of see how thick this stuff is. We used a roller to roll it on and get good coverage.

Once it started getting too slippery to walk on we could tell the stain was starting to come up. We had two deck brushes and scrubbed the whole deck down for about 20 minutes and then followed it up with a jet stream to rinse it all off. You could tell pretty quickly that it was working!

Here it is all dried that evening. Much harder to see where that new board is compared to the rest. We did the deck, the stairs, and the top of the railings that were old but we did not do all the slats in between. With the consistency of the stripper I don't think it would have worked as well on a vertical surface plus it would have been very hard to scrub. I think sanding them down and re-applying stain will make the railings blend in well enough, especially if we use a darker stain.

On Sunday we smartened up and got to work at 8:30 AM before it got really hot. It made a huge difference. First we wet everything down.

Then I mixed a 50/50 solution of cleaner and water into our new pump sprayer and Derrick sprayed the deck down with it.

I did another coat and then we got scrubbing. You're supposed to let it sit for about 15 minutes, scrub, and rinse.

And here she is after the cleaning and time to dry.

 I don't see a huge difference between the stripping step and the cleaning step but we could definitely see some gunk getting removed with the cleaner and I don't think the cleaner could do anything but good so I'm glad we did it.

The plan is to stain next Monday so hopefully the weather will cooperate!