Painting the deck...how not to be overwhelmed!

This weekend my husband and I decided it was time to tackle the deck! Our deck when we moved in was one of the things on the home inspection that needed attention. It needed a good power wash and a coat of paint. With how hot the summer was we decided to wait until fall to do it.

My husband and I are funny working together on projects like this. I am a perfectionist and he is not. We did however find a system that helped us both out and made the task not so huge. On day one of painting we spent seven hours roughly working on the deck. We started with the hard to reach rails where the trees are and then made our way around or section a a time.

We found to help minimize the paint drips he worked on the outside and I worked on the inside of the rails at the same time. This not only helped us not to drop paint but also made this daunting task go much quicker. Once we figured it out we pretty much got all the rails done in a matter of no time (second coat even!).

We know that the deck floor boards are going to need at least one more coat but we were able to roll on the first coat on day one.

So what's left to finish? Trim work (boards close to the house that couldn't be rolled), painting the spaces between the boards (bought a fancy roller for that and can use it on the extension), finishing up 1/4 of the lattice under the deck, two sets of stairs, second coat on top of the deck.

Now that the weekend is gone and the forecast is gloomy starting the end of the week, we are setting out to work from 5-7:30 pm nightly this week to see what all we can get done. Today I have some time so I am going to get a jump start on the lattice work and see what else I can get done before 5 tonight.

We were very overwhelmed with this task when we first started and now that we have a good system down we are enjoying the project and the results are amazing! It already looks like we have a brand new deck!

We also discovered we now love Menards! They have been very kind and helped us find everything we needed!

Back to work I go!
Happy painting,
Shonda

A view of the first rail we did and you can see what the deck used to look like if you look closely at the floor boards.  YUCK!

A view of the side of the deck that has the first coat and finished rails