When I bought our house just over three years ago, everything was in beautiful shape.  I have not done an exemplary job of maintaining the property so far, and one of the areas that has suffered the worst is our decks (front and rear).  Over the past few years, they built up an accumulation of dirt, grime, and algae, as well as general wear-and-tear from the sun and the rain.  Fortunately, they are still OK structurally, but the finish is not in great shape.  Back at the end of June, in preparation for my parents’ visit for the 4th of July, I decided that it was high time I remedied this situation.  Having never refinished a deck before, I appraised the situation and determined that I could probably knock the project off in a weekend.  Well, two months later, I’m finally done. :P

It turns out that stripping off the old finish of a deck is a non-trivial exercise.  There are a two primary techniques: using a chemical stripping agent to dissolve the old stain, and sanding the old stain off.  I started with the first option, since at face value, it seemed like the most complete, least labor intensive option.  In the end, I basically exhausted both techniques before finally crying “uncle” and moving onto staining.  (In fairness, I’m a bit of a perfectionist, and probably could have gotten away with doing less than I did.)

FYI, stripping chemicals are NASTY stuff.  The stuff I used was a thick, cloudy, goopy “liquid”, with a foul odor (a friend informs me that like gasoline, it’s actually the vapors that do the work to eat through the old finish).  It’s formulated to eat through latex, and dissolved the nail polish off my sister-in-law’s fingernails through the gloves she was wearing (which were made of latex, but I didn’t put two and two together until we noticed the gloves getting sticky).  The basic procedure is to “paint” this stuff over the finished surface of the deck, let it sit for 15-45 minutes (keeping it wet and/or re-applying as necessary to prevent it from drying), scrub with a brush to loosen the dissolved stain, and rinse it all off with a high-pressure hose or power washer.

This seems simple enough, and did indeed work pretty fantastically – sometimes.  There are a lot of variables, including the amount of stripper applied, the amount of stain being stripped (layers of previous coats), how long you let it sit, how wet you keep it, whether you keep it wet by spraying with water or re-applying, how much scrubbing you do, the condition of the stain being stripped, etc.  In the end, I was never able to perfect the technique – some areas of the deck the stain came right off; others it seemed nothing would touch it.  And it was very inconsistent.  In the end, I’d say I was able to remove about 70-80% of the stain from most of the deck, but only a few spots were 90-100% stripped; most areas would require additional work.  I owe a huge thanks here to all the folks that helped with this part of the project at various times, particularly Rusty, Jon, Kelly, Katherine, Megan, and Mark.  You guys were really kind to get involved in something so messy!

By the time I decided that I had exhausted the utility of the stripping chemical approach, it was late July, and the project was dragging on, but had no sign of being finished any time soon.  Although stripping had removed a lot of the stain, it had left a lot behind, and we were nowhere near ready to stain.  My next tactic was sanding.  Hand sanding would have extended the project into the next century, so I picked up a small “finishing sander” at Home Depot.  This device is held in one hand, and has a square-ish plate on the bottom which spins at 13,000 RPMs, to which one attaches a piece of sand paper.  Here’s a representative example:

I came home from the store (trip #1 of the day…), strapped on some sand paper, and went to work.  The sander worked great and took the stain right off.  However, it wasn’t long before I hit a problem.  The stuff I was trying to sand off was slightly gummy, and gummed up the sand paper within a minute or so, making it useless.  Sand paper isn’t super expensive, but it isn’t cheap either, and at the rate I was consuming it, I’d be able to build a brand new deck for the same cost.  At this point, I did what I always do when I get stuck on a project around the house – I called my Dad for advice.  He informed me that my problem was that the sand paper I was using had too fine a grit.  A courser sandpaper should work much better.  So, I went back to Home Depot (trip #2…) and found the coarsest sandpaper I could find – 40-grit (typical sandpaper is around 100-200 grit).  This stuff was like finely crushed rocks glued to paper, very rough, but Dad was right – it took the stain off, and didn’t gum up nearly as quickly.  Hooray!  I went to town sanding, and was making good progress for an hour or two, when all of a sudden, the sander turned off.  It just stopped working.  So, back to Home Depot I went (trip #3!), returned the busted sander, bought a new one of a different brand (actually, the one pictured above).  The moral of that story is, there’s a reason that Ryobi is the cheapest brand of power tools…  Anyway, to make a long story short, I spent all day that day sanding, plus another day and a half’s worth over the next few weekends, and finally, the deck was Ready To Stain!!  Here’s what it looked like after I finished removing the old finish:

Megan was off of work last Saturday, and we picked that day to do the project.  We invited a few friends and family to help, and counted down the days…  It’s vitally important that a deck be completely dry before staining it – you’re supposed to wait at least 2-3 days for it to dry if it gets wet.  To our chagrin, they were predicting rain for Friday night and Saturday morning, which would have set us back several days.  We prayed all week for the rain to hold off… and ultimately our prayers were answered!  When we got up on Saturday, it had drizzled a bit, and things were a bit wet outside.  I had laid out some tarps to keep the deck dry, but I wasn’t able to cover the whole surface, and some parts had gotten wet.  However, after a couple hours, it started to clear up, and the wetness dried up.  Since it hadn’t been a soaking rain, and we couldn’t tell any difference between the wood that had gotten wet, and the wood that hadn’t, we decided to go for it.  Some new friends of ours from church, Shawn and Katy, showed up just as we were getting started to give us a hand, and together, we put the first coat on in about an hour and a half, with no difficulties.  The next day, Katherine joined us for the final push over the finish line, and we put the second coat on.  Finally, at long last, the deck was done!!!  Here’s what it looked like afterwards:

And here we are, still in shock that we had actually completed the project:

Afterwards, Megan and Katherine and I went out for ice cream at Theno’s Dairy to celebrate.  Yum!