The $10.86 Deck Refinishing Project

Our deck was looking pretty shabby. Whoever owned the house before us decided to paint it instead of stain it (a bad idea I think), so after years of use and weathering, the paint was peeling and it was looking pretty awful. Fixing up the deck was on our "to do" list since we decided to take the house off the market, but hiring someone to do the job would have been an expensive proposition. So we decided to do it ourselves....did I mention we aren't really "do it yourselfers"?

Here's the simple steps we took to redo our deck:
#1 Ask around to find someone who had a pressure washer. We were going to rent one of these machines to blast the loose paint off the deck but that too is spendy and we didn't know how long it would actually take to do the work and thus how long we would need to rent it for. Turns out our cousin had just bought a pressure washer for his deck so we borrowed it.
#2 Hubby pressure washed the deck which got rid of all of the peeling paint, dirt, and other nasty stuff.
#3 Let the deck dry (easy to do because we have had an entire week of hot days)
#4 Go to the store and look for some paint to buy. Note that all exterior paint is kind of expensive (about $25-$30 per gallon).
#5 Ask the counter guy at the store if they have any mis-tinted paint at which time he shows me a whole rack of paint mixing mistakes.
#6 Pick up the only two gallons of mis-mixed exterior paint and do the happy dance to the register because it only costs $5 per gallon!
#7 Go home and show hubby the paint to which he exclaims "our deck is going to be bright green and off yellow???"
#8 Proceed to paint the top rail bright green, then the (many) spindles off yellow, followed by painting the deck itself bright green. This takes about five hours and I got sunburned :(
#9 Let the deck dry and then do some touch-ups of places I missed.
#10 Took a picture to add to this blog post.

Overall it was a pretty simple thing to do even though it seemed a bit overwhelming at first. The colors actually came out well--they look like complementary colors and kind of actually blend into the overall color theme of the neighborhood. I'm sure I missed some steps (like sanding the deck after it was pressure washed), but for a quick, efficient way to get the deck done without spending and arm and a leg, this worked!