Our Deck (Part One)

So I think I erred last week when I started numbering my home improvements posts. Because after this weekend (and the past couple of weeks) I'm going to have a crap ton of home improvement posts. And it's going to get old fast naming them Home Improvements Part One, Home Improvements Part Two, etc. So I'm just going to drop that part of my title (because it's my blog and I can do what I want!).

Thanks to a week of (forecasted) crazy nice and dry weather, Darrell and I decided that it would be a good time to stain and treat our deck (our builders used pre-treated wood, so we had to wait a year before doing anything to it). Now, like most of our house projects, we went into this one pretty cluelessly. We knew that there couldn't be rain in the forecast for a few days, we knew the deck had to be super dry, and we knew that we needed something with a rain coat/UV protection. So off to Menards we went, and ended up scoring a great deal on a semi-transparent stain in Redwood. Darrell was a little iffy on the color, but I insisted that I wanted the color to be a little bit richer and darker than just plain cedar. Turns out I was wrong.

Despite how it looked on the can, Redwood is actually quite red. When Darrell opened the can of stain it seriously looked like bubble gum--and the spot on our deck where we tested the stain (thankfully on the bottom) looks like someone spilled red kool-aid.

So, back to Menards we went. And this time we were prepared to do a little bit more investigating and not just jump at the first good deal we found. Well wouldn't you know, Menards has a whole section that explains how to care for and treat your deck, complete with samples of a variety of stains on actual wood. Who'd a thunk it? As we looked through their material, we realized that what we actually needed to do was use a deck wash/brightener. Over the course of the past eighteen months, our deck has grayed and weathered significantly, but didn't really have any visible dirtiness to it, so we assumed that using a stain would put the color back into it and keep it protected.


Icky, yucky looking deck before we started

Turns out that this deck brightener stuff is actually the way to go--at least for your first step. We'll still have to weather protect and stain, but holy cow am I glad we got this stuff first. Because I would not have wanted to stain this crap onto our deck:

Look at those lovely chunks of gunkiness. Yuck. I had read in a few different places that if you stain your deck a year or so after it is built that you don't really have to clean it first, but after yesterday I totally disagree. Here's a picture of our work in progress:


Isn't that difference unbelievable? The only part about this process that sucked was that we couldn't get ahold of my grandpa to get his power washer, so we had to scrub the whole thing. Not such an issue on the floor of the deck, but once we started doing the slats and railings it got to be much more of an issue. That was also about the time I got bored with the project (we were pushing our third hour by that point and despite how awesome it was, I was getting sick of it. Turns out I don't have much of a patience for long, tedious, exhausting projects). But, after nearly five hours, we finally finished. And it looks great.

We also picked up a different bucket of stain so that we don't have a kool-aid deck. And it's not even really a stain, but a clear-coat rain-guard that's slightly tinted to help with UV protection. So we'll see how that process goes tonight; here's to hoping it goes quickly so I don't get bored and annoyed with it!