Tidbits

Sleepover at Ikea - Maybe this is the only way to get to the $1 early enough…
A ramen bath - Japanese spa with special baths resembling instant noodles. I wanna play!
Old age homes for dogs - 1) Old dogs don’t like to be abandoned at strange places. 2) Playing with young puppies will probably cause the older dogs to die faster due to exhaustion.
A remote-controlled pigeon - Oh the poor thing…
An article on a brilliant method of teaching grade schoolers about bats and rabies. I smell a lawsuit.
Will trade beer for Crumpler bags. Tempted by the beanbag and messenger bags…

Deck the Halls…

June 25, 2006, 4:00 am

Somehow, in all the chaos of owning our own house, we somehow managed to be totally ignorant of one of the most costly and time-consuming aspect of house-ownership - the deck. We figured it was just gonna be mowing the lawn in the summer, raking leaves in the summer, and shoveling snow in the summer. We got the house in prime condition, so no immediate renovations are needed. Sure, the basement thing was a concern at first, but the temp fix for it was easily done. Putting up blinds was pretty painless, though we’ve been procrastinating about putting up curtains in the master bedroom for a while now. Missing some key pieces from Ikea.

But no, it seems we were totally in the dark about how much hassles a deck really is, we thought that we just need to paint some clear coat over it every few years or so and it’ll be fine. Some people just totally leave their deck alone and do nothing with it. But when we got the clear coat, they had instructions to clean the deck first, and remove all the old coating and grey dead wood. We got some weak/cheap cleaner at first, which did very little in cleaning anything. Mike got so frustrated that he insisted on getting the opaque coat for the deck just so he doesn’t have to go through all this work every year. We’ve since got a stronger solution, which worked much better at liquidifying the top layer of wood. But we still needed to roll it on, rub it in with a rough brush, and then powerwash the thing.

Then came the trouble of finding a stain for it. I just really want something that’s mostly transparent, with some tinted colouring. The more opaque paints offer better protection of course, but it makes the deck look so much more artificial. So now we have an unopened can of transparent in the garage, a can of opened semi-transparent that looks kinda sucky on our deck, and we plan on getting another brand of semi-translucent to try tomorrow.

Not to mention the tight window of opportunity for applying the seal. Have to be 2-3 days after washing the deck in order for the wood to dry, and you also need at least 48 hours of no rain afterwards for the paint to dry. You can’t apply it in direct sunlight, when the wood is too hot, when the weather is too humid, or if there’s too much condensation. I’m having serious doubts about whether we can have the deck done and dried by Saturday for the BBQ.

Of course we also learned that most pressured treated wood contained arsenic up to around 2002. So walking around the deck barefoot can be harmful, and burning the stuff is downright toxic. So yeah, the stuff to clean the deck and stain it are expensive, it takes a lot of hard work to prep and stain it, AND it’s bad for you. Having a deck is starting to suck…

Although it would be a really good place to install a hot tub. It can be sunk level with ground too! And what about a sauna in the basement?? That would be cool too…

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Sniffle, next Wednesday is Mike’s last day at work.

Linens and Thing’s 20% coupon is fun once more!