A Facelift for the Deck
When we moved into our house we were happy that there was a fairly new small deck that the previous owners had built. Sure it was not really finished… but that was something we could handle.
We planned on trimming the excess boards down and putting some kind of face board on. However it only took two days of me staring at those 2 giant seams to decide that this needed to be a bigger project if I was going to have to look at it for a good number of years.

once you notice the seam you can’t unsee it!!
Props to anyone who takes it on themselves to build a deck. It takes a little while longer but if you are using only 8′ boards you may want to think about staggering them – of course this is my personal taste and I do not mean any disrespect to the previous owners who put this in.
After a couple of quick youtube videos to introduce ourselves to the world of decking we set off to unscrew, cut and put the top board back on. We also flipped the “up” side of many of the boards to reduce cupping depending on the grain of the wood. This inadvertently created a beautiful variegated pattern!
We did have to add a few boards by the end and of course close off around the open edges. It has been a good few weeks that it was time to stain it! I like the natural color but I we figured we would try a semi-transparent stain since we will have plenty of maintenance to keep up with elsewhere in the house.
now I better keep going on the garden!
Beautiful! So proud of you both!
I’m really enjoying your projects, and progress!