You Can Do Magic: Part Four

Finally the staining and painting is done (for now, at least). The back porch with a couple of coats of new paint to touch it up and my newly planted pansies in the hanging baskets:

Pretty mums in the corner:

The stairs, freshly stained:

The front porch:

My next projects include getting a new roof on this place, repainting the front door, and painting my bedroom ceiling.

Next up: restocking my freezer.

You Can Do Magic: Part Three

So you might be wondering what happened with my staining project since I haven't written about it in almost a week. We have had rain, sometimes a little and sometimes a lot, every day since last Tuesday. Finally, today there was some sunshine, so I put one more coat of stain on the porch. I'm starting to like the color more now that it has had some time to cure. It still isn't ideal, but I think that it looks a lot better than it did before.

I also had a chance to stain a few spots on the stairs that I missed before, so here they are, looking a lot better. The one part that isn't stained or painted at the top of the stairs will be painted the same red as the porch floor. I had to wait for the porch floor to dry today, so I plan to paint it tomorrow. Once that is finished, this should all look a lot better.

Wish me luck and no rain for a few days so that I can finish these projects!

You Can Do Magic: Part Two

Day two of the staining process is now complete. This is the porch this morning after drying for about 20 hours. It got a lot lighter than I thought it would.

I got two coats of stain on both the porch and the stairs today. I ended up choosing "Redwood" to match the little patch of siding that you see to the left of the front door in the photo below. I couldn't find a stain that matched the house, so I tried to at least match that little patch. Here is the porch after two coats of stain, which I am leaving overnight and then plan to hit one more time to even it out.

I'm not crazy about the color, but I'm not sure that I can do much better. I'm hoping that once I get the planters and rug back on the porch, it will look better.

The stairs after two coats of stain:

I'm planning to paint that horizontal line that looks gray at the base of the porch tomorrow when I do the touch up work on the porch floor with the red paint. I noticed a few spots after I took this picture that I missed, but in general, it looks pretty good.

Again, I don't love the color, but I only have to live with it for another year or so. The whole idea here is to neutralize the treated lumber surfaces so that they blend in more with the rest of the house for when we put it on the market.

Stay tuned for the painting of the back porch floor (again) and the third coat of stain on the front porch tomorrow. For now, most of my body is "Redwood" in color and I am headed for the shower to become a white girl again.

You Can Do Magic: Part One

Today I began a new project on the house: the staining of the front porch and back stairs. I had planned to start over the weekend, but the weather didn't cooperate.

Before I can stain anything, I have to clean the wood with this special cleaner that I think is the same thing that they used to kill Toons in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? You rinse the wood, slather slather the cleaner on, wait for 15 minutes, scrub with a stiff bristle brush, rinse with water, and repeat the process until the wood is clean.

Here are the stairs with the cleaner soaking in:

And here they are after I scrubbed and rinsed them:

The porch was much more difficult to clean. As you can see in this "before" photo, there were a lot of greenish spots to remove:

Soaking, soaking, soaking...

I think I repeated the process about three times (more on some areas) and I got my workout in at the same time by scrubbing and scrubbing. Finally, I got it as clean as it's going to get:

All of my hard work paid off--it looks much better. There are still a few spots, but if they haven't come off by now, they aren't going to. I'm forging ahead with the staining tomorrow once everything has dried really well and I also have some touch up painting to do on the back porch and the porch furniture.

Oh, and in the process of working its magic on the wood, the cleaner got all over my legs, so then I had to scrub myself, too.

Thankfully, what got on my leg was just some of the diluted solution that splattered off of the scrub brush, so I didn't shrivel like a Toon. As I looked at this picture, I realized that I bought these shoes when I went to college in 1999. I think it might be time for them to go.

Change of Heart, Part I

Some of you gentle readers may be wondering why I haven't been updating my blog lately. Well, you're about to find out why--I've been trying to do the finish work on the house since the contractors finished about a week ago and it became more time consuming than I planned.

This next series of blogs is all about the changes that have been made to this house since I moved in three years ago. I haven't had a place to showcase these changes until now and I've also been working until now to make the house look nice. I hope that I'm about done and can enjoy my next few years living here with a minimum of projects.

So, I've spent the last week working on the porch floor. I promised several blog entries ago that I would be doing something about the disgusting, dirty, stained floor and I have. This is what I started with:

With all of the stains from unknown sources, I primed first with the Zinsser I had left from the laundry room. It's already looking better.

Then I started painting with "Cherry Cobbler," but it turned out a little more pink than I thought and also the wood was very spongy and soaking up the paint in varying amounts, so it looked blotchy when it dried.

Here's the second coat of Cherry Cobbler:

Yep, too pink. Partly the paint, partly the floor, partly the primer, but too pink.

Disaster struck as I finished the second coat of Cherry Cobbler. Out of nowhere, we had a storm and some of the porch isn't covered. So, much of my painting was ruined, but I knew I needed a darker paint and at least two more coats anyway to get the coverage I wanted. I went back to Home Depot for another gallon of paint and chose a slightly darker color called (this one's for you, Leah) "Red, Red Wine." This went much better and finally the color evened out--here it is after the fourth coat:

I let it dry overnight and here's the result:

This looks more pink in the photos than it actually is. It is really a deep red--not dark, but saturated and not hot pink.

I was finally able to put my porch furniture back on the porch--I repainted the iron furniture while the porch was being painted.

I've wanted to paint this porch since I moved in and ripped the astro turf off of it and now it is done. Four coats of paint. I will never have to do this again, I hope. The most important thing is that it eventually looked just as I had imagined it would. Definitely worth spending almost every night this week on it.