Thrifty Thursday...How Paint/Stain Can Improve a Deck

I'm so excited to show you my "new" deck. You see, we've been in our house for nearly 10 years. When we moved in our deck needed some help. We haven't touched it in all those years - something else always seemed to pop up. (I think I've written those words before on the blog.) Well, I finally, finally made it a priority this summer.

First, you need to see a few Before pictures...

Below you can see the railing and splindles - lots of leftover paint, even after sanding:

The picture below shows you the railing after I sanded it. (The spindles were already stained in this photo.)

Below is the deck itself. This picture is before we (I mean the hubby) power washed it. It was gross. Truly gross.

And I can't show you the before pictures without showing you our light. She's a beauty, right? NOT!

As for how I did it? It was really very simple but I'm not gonna lie - a little on the time-consuming side of the spectrum.

1. We power washed everything. The hubby took care of that part - thank goodness. You saw the before picture above. Here is the deck after he washed it. Much better.

Personally, I love a good "Before/After" so I put one together for you. Crazy, huh?

I have no idea why didn't AT LEAST do this step the year we moved in?!

2. Sand. Sand. Sand. You can't really see it in the pictures, but there was a TON of loose paint. I sanded the railing and spindles with 60 grit sandpaper to remove as much of the paint as possible. I then went back to the railing with 150 and 220 grit sandpaper. Much improved. (I didn't bother with the decking - too much work!)

3. Paint or stain. I technically used stain but it went on very similar to paint - just a little thinner. I used this. So far I'd recommend it. I choose the Waterproofing version rather than the more expensive Weatherproofing version. The former is guaranteed for 5 years, the latter 10 years. There is about an $8 price difference per gallon and I needed two gallons - one for the decking and railing and one for the spindles. In the end I figured we would need to do some serious work on the deck within the next 5 years.

That's it! Clean, Sand, Stain. BOOM!

But of course I couldn't opt for the easy way out. No sir. I made my deck project a little harder because I added a "rug". I didn't want to buy a rug and thought it would be fun to paint one, instead. So I did.

First, I decided how large it needed to be, taped it off, and painted the border:

I painted the white with three coats - but I just bought a sample pot and that worked great. When the white was done, I needed to tape it off so I could paint the inside and outside of the "rug":

After I taped off the white I wanted to try and eliminate bleeding of the other colors onto my white border. So first I painted the edges of the tape with white so that would fill in any holes and the green or brown wouldn't bleed through. It wasn't perfect but it did help!

The Rug:

To apply the paint I used a brush for the first coat and the entire rug. For the second coat I used a painter pad with a long handle screwed into it which worked great.

And that's it. Now...for the beauty shots. There are lots of them!

In the picture below you can see how the flower pot hides the pole for my lights. Cool, huh?

I love my new light. And the best part? It was only $20!

(Yes, I know I need to refinish my picnic table. Again. But I can only work on one project at a time!)

Do you want to know one of the reasons I love our deck so much? Because this is my view:

We actually back up to a fairly busy street. Most people think that's a negative. I think it's a positive. It means we don't have any neighbors spying on us. And with all the trees, we can't see the street at all during the summer months. It's a little more sparse in the winter when only the evergreens are filled out, but it's not like we sit out there watching the snow fall!

And one last shot, because I want to. And this is my blog:)