Suburban Goddess

Since I’ve moved into my new home, I often find myself waiting for things to fix themselves. It is only after I’ve received a third letter (certified) from the homeowner’s association do I realize, “Crap, I need to do that.”

This particular weekend, I looked out my back door to find my deck looking back at me. The wood had faded to a silvery grey, which matches the brick of my house, but doesn’t particularly do anything for me. As long as I can remember, I’ve wanted a deck. Now that I have one, I realize that decks require maintenance. And maintenance, when you are a single woman, SUCKS. So I packed up the kid and we headed over to Home Depot. After setting her up with various pictures of kid’s rooms from the neighboring Disney paint display, I set out to figure out how in the hell one refinishes their deck. 45 minutes later, I left the store with a gallon of deck cleaner/stripper and a gallon of stain. Easy enough.

The first rule in deck stripping is to make sure you have sufficient daylight when you begin. I chose to begin at 6:00pm on Friday night. Not smart. This means I was on my hands and knees with a wire brush by 8pm, and my motion-sensor light does not work unless you’re STANDING. Use your imagination. If you’re laughing, your imagination is right on target.

When I awoke on Saturday morning (with Alex’s help), I stood in front of a pristine deck… after admiring my handiwork for a few moments, I pulled out the can of stain and began to paint. With a brush. One board at a time.

Yeah, go ahead. Laugh at me. Because if I were standing on the other side, I’d be laughing at me too. WHAT was I THINKING? As I finished the final board of the flooring at 6pm with the sun setting behind me, I realized I didn’t have enough paint to finish one rail. ONE RAIL. Do you know what it’s like to stand three feet from the finish line and suddenly realize you have no use of your legs? After stretching the last of the paint as far as I possibly could, I realized I would have to go back and get more paint. I called it an evening, and sat back to look at my new, imitation-cedar deck. It’s amazing what changing the color of something can do to the atmosphere; I spent the rest of the evening sitting in the patio furniture and dreaming of ways to turn my backyard into a Japanese oasis….

Tomorrow…. more paint.  And maybe a koi pond.

This entry was posted on October 21, 2007 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.