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Monday, April 30, 2012

Staining the Fence

Wanna know a great way to lose an extra few pounds and your mind at the same time??  No?  No one else wants to go crazy too?  Well, it's a rhetorical question, so I'm gonna tell ya anyways!

Decide the afternoon before one of your best friends is coming in town with her 9 week old baby to restain your entire 400 linear foot fence.  All while the house is a disaster.  I at least started on it while Kalia was napping, and she thankfully took a two hour nap before waking up!  Chris was on baby duty while I finished up.

We're re-sodding the back yard (post soon!), which is one of those projects where in order to do that correctly, you have to get other things done.  If anyone has ever stained a fence, you know that the stain kills anything and everything around it.  So I wanted to stain before we re-sodded.  So at 3:30 on a Sunday afternoon, I started.

Here's what the fence looked like previously :


We installed it when we first moved in...literally that first week.  I don't know why we thought that would be a good task to take on ourselves, but it's one of the few things I wouldn't do again.  Building an entire fence with two people while you're moving is quite a bit of work!   I did one coat of stain on it a few weeks after we built it, and never got around to doing the second coat.  I actually started staining using a paint brush, and only made it about 12 ft before Chris came home with a spray gun and let me know that was absolutely ridiculous.


The sprayer is so so much quicker and nicer, but it's a pain to clean.  We've got a system that works for us -I stain the fence, Chris cleans the sprayer.  My legs were sore sore sore from staining this.  In order to keep your stain from streaking, you have to do nice and even coats, which means you need to go up and down the fence panel with your sprayer.  I think I did about 1000 squats.

But hey, my sisters wedding was yesterday, and I've been trying to get back into pre-Kalia shape for it!  I get my workouts where I can these days!

The work was definitely worth it...here's what the fence looks like now :


Chris snapped up a few action shots of me moving my stain.  As always, Kodi was helping!


Chris : "smile!!"  Me : "Seriously?!?!"
And here's a good one to show you a side by side comparison of before and after with what a huge difference the new stain makes!


I promise it'll look so much better when the sod is actually laid instead of that huge dirt patch that's in the back.  Stay tuned for a post on that!  We do have one area of grass that's decent in the back, so here's what our nicely stained fence will look like once we get finished installing the sod :


We're actually on a big kick to get a lot of the exterior projects to the house while it's not too terribly hot out.  Anyone that lives in Florida knows that doing a ton of exterior house projects in the middle of the summer can be brutal!

Anyone else getting exterior projects done while the weather is still nice, and not too hot?  I have a feeling the hot summer months are going to slip up on us before we know it!

Happy Monday everyone!

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I'm linking up to the parties in my sidebar, go see what kind of workouts everyone else is getting!

3 comments:

  1. I could seriously sing the praises of our paint/stain sprayer too! Those things are worth every single penny! We had also started to use a paint brush when we put the first coat on and then quicker realized that it was going to take an eternity. Must be in our genes that women are better at doing at doing the staining since I was the one who stained ours while my husband did the unstopping, etc.. too.

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  2. I know, those things are seriously amazing!! I think women are better because we pay more attention to details than men :-). And we're more patient! I can't imagine doing the whole thing with a paint brush!

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  3. sаy mаny thanks foг a tremendοus post and
    a all round enjoyable blog (I also love the theme/design), I don’t havе time to read thгough it аll at thе fencing materials

    ReplyDelete

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