A couple of years ago we built a deck, some of which got documented here.  And here.  And here.  Here.  Here.  Here. Here. Here.  Anyway, you get the picture.  So last year I got almost nothing done, or rather nothing that I ended up writing about here.  Actually I got tons of stuff done, some of which even made the deck almost usable for humans.  But in the end I traveled for half of the summer which made progress on the deck pretty tough, much to my dismay.  But not this year.  Nossir, we have been busy little beavers this year.

First off, it seems that leaving cedar untreated for even one summer really changes the colour from that awesome reddish gold to, well, grey.  So, I decided that we would sand the deck back to it’s original luster before we stained it.  If I can offer one word of advice however, it’s to actually wash the deck with a commercial product before you try sanding.  That stuff brings the colour back way faster, and with much less effort and time than sanding.  We did it both ways, and in some places the effort and time to sand grey cedar back to new was long indeed.  Where we washed the wood first, it was trivial to sand it quickly and stain it.  So there you go.

Read on for obsessive documentation….

Here’s some pics of the differences, you can see why I wanted to get the colour back.

First, the colour of the wood as I installed it:

Here is the decking the following spring, you can see the beginning of the change in the colour.  Railing posts not yet cut here, and no stairs so the lovely makeshift gate.

Here’s a little test this spring that convinced me to sand….

So we rented a big old floor sander and got to work…. Several hours worth of work.

Finally some stain, that’s more like it.

And this is where we are today, but the gazebo has a roof and most of these louvers are installed.  Almost there.

So there you go, most of the progress to date, mostly documented, mostly for my own benefit.