The deck approaches finishment

The new deck project has been a long time in the making. Many moons ago, Wayne and I did the framing for the upper and lower decks. Shortly thereafter, I framed the stairs and laid down all the deck boards that we had. (Some from Parr Lumber and some reused from the old deck.) A couple weeks after that, I got secondhand boards from Craigslist to finish up the decking. Eventually I got around to rebuilding the arbor and starting the plants to grow up it.

The remaining things to do were to screw down all the boards and stain the deck. I had been waiting to do the screwing because screws cost a lot of money when for the volume needed. Also the staining needs a couple days to a week of nice, predictable weather since I would need to scrub and pressure wash the boards, then wait for them to dry, then stain, then wait for it to dry, before we could have any sprinkles.

Leave it to Sarah to put a priority on things. She signed up the deck (and our house) for a friend's baby shower, which is on for this coming Sunday. So starting last week, I put in all the screws and today I stained the whole thing.

I ended up using about three 5 pound boxes of Deck-Mate style screws, 2 1/2" long. Each box was about $25. The screwing was a little laborious because the boards had been down for a while, and most of them were used, so they were a little warped and wowed. Sarah sighted down each board as I pried it into position with a breaker bar and then added screws.

After the screwing was completed on Friday, I scrubbed the deck with some deck-specific soap stuff. It wasn't a serious deck cleaner because the boards weren't seriously dirty and I was going to pressure wash it anyway. On Saturday, I rented a pressure washer for 4 hours and quickly rinsed and sprayed the whole deck. The boards looked great and acquired a more uniform appearance, which was particularly lacking since they came from three sources and were a mixture of fir and cedar.

And then today I used almost exactly one gallon of Olympic Maximum Semi-Transparent "Cedar NaturalTone" stain for the whole deck. It was about $25 for the can. It looks really nice now - the previously different colored boards are now pretty much the same tone. Some of the rough edges are smoothed down. It looks good, right?

All that's left now is to set up the misters under the arbor and paint the railings white.