Stained deck!

Stained the deck last night.  It looks pretty good - but you can see lines where I reloaded the deck pad with stain, even though I carefully followed the directions and smoothed up over stain already applied...  (Also, this is just a clear coat, so it shouldn't really be colored at all!).  Hopefully that fades out as it continues to dry?

Anyway, still looks better than concrete!

Deck!

This weekend, we went from this:

to this:

No more ugly concrete patio.  And shockingly, it's actually almost finished!  We ran out of screws 3 times, and so I have about 8 more to put in, I have one final cut to make, and then I need to seal it.  Bringing the cedar up the cement stairs will the next phase of it, but that probably won't happen until at least May.

Jaimee was a deck superstar, Max and his buddy fixed my falling down fence slats (if you shoot all the nails in from the inside, the slats on the outside will start popping off as they age, thanks fence contractor) and then turned to framing and decking, and R2 was a key last minute reinforcement fetching more screws and wielding the drill and the garbage bag.

Decking is better than a gym trip - whole body soreness!