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Our house...in the middle of the woods - back deck

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One of the funniest thing about the listing for our home was that it said something about the backyard being ready for a cocktail party.  I don't know what you envision when you think of a cocktail party, but I can tell you that no lady in heels wanted to be in our backyard...or our back deck.  I loved the size of our deck the first time I saw it...and hated the red - probably because of the brick.

I'll be honest - moving in with an almost 1 year old and so many "immediate" redo needs....we didn't take care of our deck.  We aren't convinced it was built to too high of a quality standard either, but we didn't love the wood like we should have.  So fast forward to this year and it was something I both wanted and needed to work on.  We replaced a few boards and needed to stain all of them.  I should say that our long term goal for this space is to make it screened in.  The mosquitoes around here are no joke!  We love our creek and our "it rained too much" pond, but they breed mosquitoes.  We think that screening this in will enable us to use this space way more than we do now.

I had a couple goals for this project:
 - remove the bench.  First, the wood was starting to look a little bad, but also, I had a feeling we'd gain a bunch more square footage with it gone.  In the picture above it's behind the tree bush on the right and runs the length of the deck.  We've enjoyed having it for our toddler to sit on pretty safely, but the condition of the wood was jeopardizing that.
 - spend little to zero money.  The week after I decided to start this project, my husband was laid off from his job.  I was excited about the extra time & set of hands I'd have to do this project, but definitely wanted to watch what was spent.

So I was off to shop in our little shop.  I found the original stain from the previous application and decided that I could live with the spindles being red.  I should add that not only did I not love the color, it was really hot on your feet as this area gets almost all day sun.

Removing the bench was NO JOKE.  While I'm pretty sure they used 20 nails for the whole deck floor, it felt like they used 20 nails on each leg (6) of the bench.  There were at least 5 nails on each leg + 3-4 nails to secure the top section by the leg to the railing.  I started by trying to pull them out, but the railing is in such delicate shape that it was breaking.  So we switched to simply cutting the nails out.  It probably saved me a day's work.  And immediately it felt like the deck doubled in size. 

On a trip to Home Depot (maybe related to this...I had to get a new jigsaw blade), but maybe related to another project at home or work, I decided to swing by the paint section.  I was thinking about green spindles and a brown floor when I started the project, but the change to "spend very little $$" changed that idea.  As I looked at paint cards for the browns, I thought I had a good idea of what I wanted, but wanted to think it over a bit.  As I normally do, I swung by the Oops section.  And there it was: a gallon of exterior paint...almost exactly what I had picked on one of the cards...for $8!  What?!?!  I swooped that can up and cradled it like a baby!

While I knew I didn't want to keep the whole bench, I decided to keep about 1/2 of it and put it in a small section that it would fit perfectly in (for now, I still think it's too big!).  I grabbed some green paint that I had just enough of and waalaa. 

Put the bench, table, chairs and umbrella back.  Added a strand of lights that I found on the curb and we were back in business!  We've eaten out here twice before it started to be 90 at 9am... ;-)




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