Deck Work

We have moved to the exterior of our house for our next house project.  When we first bought our house, we knew that the back deck was something that was eventually going to need attention.  Not structurally, but aesthetically.  The paint and stain was starting to peel within the first year, and it just got a little worse over the past winter.  Both sets of our parents, along with my sister and her kids, came out for a visit and helped with the project.  While the project is not one hundred percent done, the heavy lifting has been completed.  All that remains is the painting which can be done over the course of a weekend. 

The first steps were taken at the beginning of the month.  We stripped away all the old paint from the planks, but struggled to decide what to do with the spindles that lined the deck.  We eventually determined that it was going to be much easier to remove the spindles, there were only two screws per, and sand the paint away.  Over Memorial Day weekend, my in-laws came into town.  We had plans to make some decent progress, but Mother Nature had other ideas.  The entire time that they were here we were in the midst of a mini heat wave.  It was topping out in the mid to high 90s, with heat index topping 100.  Because this project is something that we can take our time on, we did not feel rushed to work on it.  We got everything removed and stripped a good number of spindles, but it was just too hot to do anything.  I mean, why would you exert yourself on a project that does not need to be completed quickly?

This past weekend, my parents and sister came out and we finished the most difficult part of the project.  We built a privacy fence on one side of the deck.  We are extremely close to our neighbor's house.  In fact, their driveway butts right up to our property.  So it will be nice to be able to sit on the deck and not look into their living room or back den.  It ended up running the length of the deck (about eight feet) and is about seven feet tall.  We also replaced the lattice work that was on the bottom of the deck.  The previous owners just placed cheap white plastic lattice work around the edge and it looked terrible.  Over the course of time, the white plastic took on a green hue from all the grass being cut.  With the paint, we hope to avoid that. 

The last things that we have to do are reattach the spindles and paint the deck.  We bought it at the start of the project and that is what got the ball rolling.  It needs two coats and needs to be painted when there is no rain in the forecast for two or three days.  This is the most difficult part because not only do we have to work around the weather, we have to work around our work schedules.  Not having every weekend off will make this last part very difficult.  The nice thing is that all the hard work is done and we can still use the deck.  It'll just look incomplete until we have time to paint it all.