More Than a Facelift - The Deck Before & After

I haven't shared many photos of the back of the house, but I'll change that with this post.  We have a nice private backyard.  And there's a lot of decking on the back of the house.  It provides lovely outdoor living space as well as a connection to the 'bonus room' over top of the garage.  It's sturdy and in good shape.  But, while I love the style of the big X shaped railings, they fall woefully short of building code requirements. So we need to make some changes.


While rules vary a bit from town to town, most towns require a deck railing that's 36" tall, with balusters that don't have any gaps over 4".  With those big X shapes, we have gaps much bigger than that.  In addition, we didn't have any railing on the side of some of the staircases.  Again, a building code violation.  So we wanted to rectify that as well.

Kyle got to work pulling out the old railing and adding in the new.  It's amazing how much fresher it makes the deck look, with that simple addition.  And of course the railing on the stairs makes it feel so much safer.

But, it created the domino effect.  You know, that thing that happens when you make one change and it impacts everything else?  Suddenly the old decking, which hadn't looked so bad before, looks old and dingy.

The decking needs cleaning!

So, I got a container of Behr wood deck refresher.  In theory, I just needed to spray it on, wait 15 minutes and scrub it off, to clean it all up.  But I guess our deck was extra dirty, because I found myself on my hands and knees with a putty knife and coarse steel wool, trying to get the old dirty finish off.

And once that was done, it looked better - but, it still didn't look as nice and pristine as all that new railing.














So, step 2, I decided to stain the deck.  I looked at lots of options, but decided that a solid color made the most sense.  Despite all that cleaning, it still had funky dark spots and a translucent stain would just magnify that.   What a difference, it looks beautiful!  Suddenly the whole deck looks nice and fresh!

This project turned out to be quite a bit bigger than I expected.  But, now that we're done, it really does look great!

Dinner al fresco anyone?

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