Is It Really Done?

A little over a month ago, with virtually NO experience whatsoever, I started the solo process of stripping and re-staining the deck of the Cul De Sac Shack and quickly gave up.

Then, just as quickly, I said, “fuck it,” and proceeded to start making thrice weekly trips to Home Despot for pressure washers, sanders, scrapers, and enough paint stripper to decompose a human body.

Now, after a month of washing, scraping, sanding, and staining, it’s finally done.

I still need to do the touch-ups between the deck boards and fix a couple blunders, but for the most part, I’m pretty damn happy with the results.

I made a lot of poor choices along the way, but for someone with no refinishing experience whatsoever, I’ll take it.¹

I learned a lot over the past month—way more than I ever wanted—about the process of refinishing a deck, and this is some of it:

1. Resist the daily urge to quit, set your deck on fire, and sit in a lawn chair drinking beers as you watch it burn.
2. Wash your deck but skip the toxic deck stripper that they pimp; it’s worthless on a semi-transparent deck, even when you follow the directions.
3. Fuck railings. Next time, I’ll ditch wood railings and have them replaced with a composite of some sort.
4. If you have tightly spaced wood railings, a drill with mini sanding drums is what finally got the semi-translucent stain off the inner posts. Had I known this in the beginning, I could have saved about a week’s worth of time. Go lightly until you get your touch!
5. Don’t try to stain alone (I did). Too many drips to chase and take care of solo and too many up and downs fetching tools.
6. Don’t try to do rides, hikes, or mow the grass on the same days you plan on working on the deck. Especially if it’s 80˚ and you’re a 52-year-old man with little to no experience in refinishing a deck. I quickly learned that my body and mind can NOT handle that much in one day anymore. I can hike upwards of 8 miles at a time, but getting up and down off the deck 200 times an afternoon has me feeling like I got hit by a truck. Literally, everything hurts.
7. Use a sprayer. I did not, and it shows, especially on the outside of the deck railing, where a brush was needed. It would have also saved on stain and time.
8. Knee pads, the sort for flooring and stuff. You will 100% want them.
9. Don’t stress about it. After the failure of the stain stripper, I was about to give up and just pay someone to do the job next year. Instead, I looked at it as a learning experience and a chance to prove to myself that I could do it. Sure, I spent a lot of money on tools and stuff and uttered the word “fuck!” more than ever before, but it was still way cheaper than paying someone to do it.
10. I hope there is not a “next time,” but if there is, I know I have just enough skills and learned enough to make the deck look pretty darn “good enough.”

This now concludes the Deck Diary entries. I hope to never write about a DIY project again, and as soon as my body stops aching, I look forward to getting back into the woods for some rides and lumbers with my camera.

Later.

1. I did paint the deck on our last house about 10 years ago, but it was just slapping some deck “restore” paint-like bullshit on decaying wood, and it lasted about 3 days before peeling.