Yeah, it was disgusting. All of the finish had worn off so we had a whole lot of mildew taking over the deck. It was the ultimate slip and slide, when wet, the deck would knock you down on your you-know-what. Eventually the mildew started growing up the house. Awesome.

I searched locally  for some deck refinishing quotes, but they all were over $1000.00 and I’m cheap.  So we got to shopping…

We started off with Clorox pro results outdoor cleaner to remove the mildew

It received  significantly better health  reviews from goodguide.com compared to other outdoor cleaners.

You can buy this at any home improvement for only $5

With a few direct sprays, the mildew came right off. No scrubbing needed Holla’ back.

Once the deck was green-free, we moved onto the sanding. We have a palm sander, but sanding a 250 square foot deck with 60 grit and then again with 100 grit would take days. So we rented one of those beast sanders for refinishing floors. You can rent them from the Home Depot, $40 gets you 4 hours of pure sanding pleasure. jokes.

I thought I took a photo of the sander and sanding process, but unfortunately I can’t find it.

This is what she looked like after being sanded:

So much better! Once we  swept and vacuumed all of the dust, it was ready to be stained.

We went with Sherwin Williams deckscapes in chestnut.

I did a lot of research on stain and found that oil base absorbs into the wood where latex sits on top. Which  hopefully means that we won’t have to do this again for a while.

To apply the stain, he used a 4″ brush for cutting in around the house and 1/2″ nap roller. He was generous with the stain so that it would penetrate the wood, but not enough to leave puddles of stain on the deck. Two gallons of stain was just enough for two coats.

We’re not professionals when it comes to this stuff and I’m sure there are much better ways to go about staining your deck. I will say that with this DIY method, we got pretty darn good results! You’ll see that in the second picture the deck looks a little  dirty.  The one thing I didn’t think of when I picked the stain color was that it will show a lot more dirt than a lighter stain. (I sprayed it down in attempt to clean it for this picture) And of course, after the deck was finished, we did a little demo on the yard that left us with a 400 square foot section of dirt along the deck.  We’ve been tracking dirt everywhere! Ugh. Once all of the  new grass grows in, I hope it  won’t be such an issue.

Either way, I’m pretty psyched to get this checked off the list  Now onto the million other “to-do’s”…