House in the Works—Deck Re-do

It took me about a whole day of playing with like 100 paint cards, holding them against the house in the bright sun part of the day, in the shadowed areas, up against the gutters, the outbuildings, etc., and finally I weeded them down to what I thought would look good around here.

 

A Fall Rainbow, if you will.

And our new shingles were called Autumn Blend.  See the connection?

The porch colors, basically a dark red and dark brown, were already picked and painted so those set the initial scheme.  Plus, that our house and fences are still Fake Cedar Orange made it so it had to be in there. 

Finally, that decision of the general color scheme was made, but then I was really struggling to decide what exactly to do for the deck out of these choices.  ‘Cause you know the screen porch which is now red and brown connects to the deck and then when we paint the whole house a new color… blah blah.  After whining about it maybe one time too many, Gary took it upon himself to politely choose for me which amounted to a random pointing to a this and a that.  And then there was no more discussion.  We went to town to get the paint/stain needed in the colors he had so thoughtfully pointed to, and I went to town getting this deck re-do party started.

When we were looking at this farm and considering buying it, it appeared everything was so nicely painted.  Yes, it was Fake Cedar Orange, but still it was a nice, new looking finish.  See what it was like a year ago June? 

Well, introduce one long snowy, icy winter and some other factor that I don’t really know about (watered down paint? wrong kind of stain?  improper prep?), and most of that stain was practically gone from all the deck flooring by the time spring came around.  Throw in a huge dog with huge claws living on this deck (despite the doggie condo sitting there nicely in the yard), and our deck was embarrassingly in need of serious work this whole summer: 

  

Yucky deck.  So we replaced a couple bad boards and I went over the whole thing with the power washer a couple of times and then applied a deck prep solution.  Then it was ready for stain!

 

So Gary’s dictate was for this:

And it turned out like this: 

   

This big wooden table is going but since Gary couldn’t lift for so many weeks, it’s stayed put and I basically painted around it.  I do love my new tablecloth.  Thanks, Mom!

 

It was so hard to stop since the paint was making such a huge improvement, but painting the rest of the fence and house will have to come next year.

And look at these gates!  We Scooter-proofed.

 

The design basically came out of a combination of what would add structural strength to the gate and what Scooter could not fit his head through.

I absolutely love them.  Except for the finicky latches… but the Scooter-proof part, I love them!

   

Unfortunately, Bob/Bruce did not get the stay off the deck memo. 

You know…confession time… I still do not know one cat from the other after more than a year, and Caroline just told me this one pictured is Bruce.  The only names I call them are Bobrooska or KitKit so I figure I’m covered.

Once I got going, I had second thoughts about such a light color for the floor boards, but I’d already put on two coats of the solid-color stain and I don’t think there is much more you can do to get rid of it other than to completely strip the stain (not me), so we will live with it and see how it fares.  It’s so light that it shows every little grain of shingle coating that comes down off the new roof, not to mention all the bits of dirt and tree debris.  I guess I will just keep the broom in hand. 

I don’t have that much other stuff to do.

The one upside of the floor color is now you can’t see the dog hair.  But he’s banned from the deck now anyway.  Btw, boy, was he hatin me for awhile. 

 

Headline:  Dog Gets the Boot

Family Takes Back Their Deck

I like it much better this way.