Last night, Cary and I spent about 2 1/2 hours staining our deck. We did the entire thing by hand with brushes, starting with the rails and vertical surfaces and ending with the floorboards. The last few floorboards and the steps were stained practically in the dark, so I’m thinking the stairs may have a few slivers of non-stained areas that I missed.
We installed motion-detecting lights on the back porch which should have allowed us to finish working with at least some light, but I forgot to increase the timer and sensitivity on the motion detector before we started working. So basically the lights would come on only when we were walking around. If we stayed in one position (i.e., crouced on the deck brushing on the stain), the lights wouldn’t detect movement and would turn off. So from 8:45 until about 9:30, I would stain for a few minutes, then get up and walk around to trigger the motion detector, lather, rinse, repeat.
The stain is a bit darker than we were expecting, but we’re happy with the results:
