Deck Transformation

As some of you might know, or noticed in the previous posts, I have been working on refinishing our deck. I stained it about 4 years ago with a solid stain that I never really liked. I had been waiting on Mother Nature to help me remove it and finally decided to start to tackle it on the Fourth of July weekend. I first redid the swingset. I was restaining it the same color, so all I had to do was powerwash it (thanks to the Knauer's for letting me borrow their power washer on a long term basis), sand as necessary, and reapply the stain. It took me all of that weekend for the swingset, when I originally thought I could do both that same weekend (silly me). The difficulty was that I had to remove the old stain completely, since I was going with a semi-transparent stain that matches the swingset. After trying a few methods of removal, I found a stripper that worked well. The problem was it had to be brushed on and had to stay wet for 15 minutes, before you could wash it off. With the weather like it has been, I could only do a small section at a time and constantly keep applying it. After understanding why it says to wear protection after it started eating away the skin on my fingers to the point they started bleeding, I decided to get a pair of rubber gloves to complete the job. After I got the stain off, I had to sand all of the wood since the power washer would rough up the wood when it was removing the stain. Once I got it stripped down to the bare wood (see picture above), all I had to do was find agreeable time and weather to apply the new stain. Luckily, I finally finished it up just in time for Brandon's birthday party this weekend.

NOTE: If you roll your mouse over the picture you can see the transformation from the bare wood to the newly stained deck. [Yes, I am a geek!]