Well, I have to admit that I have not been all that prolific so far this cottaging season, but it has already proven to be a busy one. We have hit the ground running this year, having already started stripping our badly peeling deck of its partial coating of (truly abhorrent) red paint . We have also managed to re-establish contact with our AWOL septic engineer and hope to be efficiently bio-degrading before the end of the summer. And this is all before the summer solstice.
The repainting of the deck is proving to be quite a bit more involved than I had originally hoped, and we have not even begun to consider what the new colour will be. We have gone so far as to purchase a low end pressure washer of our own (1700 psi), but that proved to be insufficient to remove much more than the loosest of the paint (although I did manage to introduce a few new gouges to the deckscape when I decided to try just a little bit harder). We are slowly cycling through all of the various removal possibilities, progressing from water-based stripper to long-handled scrapper, all resulting in a slightly different colour and texture on each part of the deck. I am pretty sure that this is not the recommended technique to follow, but at this point it looks like we are going to have to sand the beejezus out of it regardless...and it is not like I could get two "experts" (books, magazines, hardware store employees, websites, etc.) to recommend the same procedure anyway.
All this to say that, I have been derelict in my efforts on this site recently, and hope to remedy that in the near future. I also hope to be providing a few more examples of what to do (rather that what not to do) around the cottage in the near future...although, if you can benefit from my mistakes, maybe it was not a total loss.
See you on the range,
Derek
