What the Deck?!?!

When we first looked at our house before buying it I thought, wow-that's a lot of deck!  A few years later and we realized, it was time for the deck to be re-stained.  Like everything else about the house, we liked the deck but didn't love the color.  It had an orange-ish look to it.  Also like everything else about the house, we chose to use a gray color for the stain to change the look.  Check out the results below:

This was definitely a labor of love.  We went through 15 gallons of stain.  Everything needed two coats of stain as we changed the color.  We chose Sherwin Williams SuperDeck Solid Stain in Caribou.  We waited until they had a 40% off sale and bought the stain.   They said they would honor the price if it wasn't enough.

It was NOT enough.  We went back a month later and they still honored the price.

We have two decks in our yard, one right off the dining room with a set of stairs and then another deck connected by a wood path that surrounds the pool - including a pergola (more on that nightmare later!)  Here you can see how badly chipped the existing finish is on the deck:

The first step was to remove everything off the deck and then clean it.  For the initial cleaning, a broom or leaf blower worked well for us.  Then using 80-120 grit sandpaper, we used a palm sander to sand the floorboards and handrails of the deck, along with any random spots that needed attention.  It wasn't necessary to sand the existing stain off completely, but just enough to remove all of the chipped pieces off from the existing stain.  Then we used a deck cleaner solution to wash the deck completely and hosed it off with water.  Look how much better it looks already!

Due to the fact that I enjoy painting, I own several spray paint guns.  This was crucial in re-staining the deck since we had no less than 5 million spindles that needed to be stained.  The upper deck off the house was phase 1 of the project.  I tackled the spindles with my spray gun and my husband got to work on the deck floor and supporting beams.  This deck went relatively quickly, and even with applying two coats we were able to finish the same day - about 7 hours.


Here is a picture of the upper deck as we waited for it to dry.

Phase 1 went well and gave us false confidence that Phase 2 would follow suit.  I spent a couple hours the following weekend staining the pathway that connects the two decks and the stairs on the pool deck so that we wouldn't have to worry that we would tread on our only entrance to that deck later on.

We repeated the steps of removing everything from the pool deck, cleaning, sanding, and washing.  Then it was time to stain.  This took several days...much longer than the previous deck.  The pergola took a day by itself.  I used my spray gun and got on a ladder and sprayed each slat in the pergola and then moved the ladder to the next area.  Every section, both sides of the slates, two coats.  I was ready to kick down that pergola.
Here is after just one coat, you can still see some of the orange showing through:

We also had to be careful around the pool and some of the other permanent fixtures like the pool slide.  For those areas, I hand stained so that there wasn't a risk of getting a lot of stain in the pool.  The area in the back of the pool simply consists of spindles around the edge, no deck floor to stand on.  This required a somewhat Spiderman type feat to successfully stand on the spindles while using the spray gun to stain the area next to it, and repeat.  Perfection was not the goal at this point, we were just looking to finish.  So there may be a few "orangish" spots that may need some touch up down the road but for now we would rather enjoy the deck than continue to slave away on something that gets accumulates rain and bird poop on an almost daily basis.


Did I mention that we went through 15 gallons of stain, broke one air compressor, broke one spray paint gun, and wondered why we were crazy enough to buy a house that had a deck of that size?  Oh the joys of home ownership.


Well here it is, in all its glory.  In the end, I'm really happy with the results and love the outcome.  The neighbors have also told us how much better it looks as well so some could say we raised the overall property value of the entire block...
So who is crazy enough to want to tackle their own deck?  Did I scare you away from doing it yourself?


Follow me on Facebook at Flipping Unbelievable to check out more of my work.