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.