Deck refinishing, day 13

Got the chance to stain the floorboards of the deck this weekend. Gave it a nice orange-y cedar finish.


I like the results, but since the floorboards look so great I think the railing is going to have to be done as well. They at least were stained, so we don't need to strip anything off of them, but a good sanding is probably in order.

In other silliness, I took this picture of Jingle the other day:



And thought she looked remarkably like a walrus:



Fun photoshop projects ensue:

Deck refinishing, day....12?

After a week long break from the deck troubles, the guy we hired (Tony, handyman extrordinaire) came by this morning to start work on the porch. Joe stopped at home on his lunch break to see it in progress. While they were talking, Tony understated, "Man, that paint is really hard to get off!"

But, here's what it looked like when I got home tonight:

Much, much MUCH better. He's coming by tomorrow to finish some sanding and smooth out the roughness, and by this weekend I can start staining. Hooray for calling in the professionals!

Deck refinishing, day 04

After 3 trips to Home Depot (good thing we live really close) I finally got the right connection for the pressure washer to make it work. I'm not sure why the hose-to-machine connection had to be so specific, but glad I could finally make water come out of it.



Well....the stubborn paint still didn't want to let go. When the paint stayed there and the wood around it started to splinter up I decided it was time to scratch the pressure washer off of my list of options. So with day 5 approaching and problems still looming I did what any self-sufficient person would do.

I looked up a handyman service online to do it for me.

Deck refinishing, day 03

Got the pressure washer today, can't get it to work. The water is going thru the hose, the machine is running, but nothing is going to the pressure nozzle. Somebody kill me.

Deck refinishing, day 02

Started out today by putting more paint remover on a small section of our porch and letting it sit for a while. Then I used a paint scraper on it and blasted it with the hose. This was the result.



Better, but still less than desirable. I got really irritated with all that work for nothing, so I decided to go and paint the computer room blue.



It looks nice, but I also ended up dropping a (nearly empty) paint tray on the carpet. Got some pretty blue spots all over the corner, oops. I suck at home improvements. Oh well, we wanted to replace the carpet at some point anyway, this is just another good reason.

One of Joe's friends from work is going to let us borrow her power washer next. We'll see if that can blast off some of the paint. The porch saga continues....

Deck refinishing, day 01

Our back porch has been looking kind of shabby since this winter. When we moved in last year it was painted the same color as the house. The paint didn't stand up to the Portland rain, and has been flaking up ever since. Here's what it looked like before I started today.


We started off with some Behr brand paint stripper that was supposed to lift the paint in as little as 5 minutes. After waiting for a full half hour, we started to scrub the deck down with a push broom and blast it with water. This was the result a long time later.



I fail to see how this is better. It did take some of the paint off, but it was spotty. And I used a lot of water trying to spray it off with the hose. Not sure if it was our fault in our application or if it was the product's crappiness. And my skin did not like contact with the paint stripping chemicals, so tomorrow I'm going to go buy a sander. I heard that has better results.

Newly fixed car and hot weather

Finally got our car back this week from the 'hey welcome back from Alaska, here's a fender-bender' scenerio. Here's the before pictures.

Looks much better now with a not-smashed bumper and new paint!

In other news, we had a super warm weekend with Texas-like temperatures. The car read 101 yesterday when we were out. This is the way Jingle likes to lay around the house when she's warm. It's really funny looking.