Phew! This week is going to look a little differently than my other weeks, because I broke my phone and lost ALL of my pictures and videos (back up your phones everyone!) so I came to the end of the week with almost nothing to show! So I haven’t included a video this week, but I was able to snap a couple pics. Thankfully this week didn’t include any huge projects, just a few odds and ends.

This week I finally got around to pressure washing the deck. This process was much more tedious than the fence due to all the nooks and crannies on the deck railing, and it also left me a little worse for wear. Because I had to stand on the ground to get the outside of the deck, all of the water from the pressure washer sprayed back onto me, so it wasn’t a very enjoyable few hours! Still, the job is done and we can finally get to staining next week, which I’m very much looking forward too. Visually, pressure washing the deck didn’t make all that much of a difference as it did with the fence, so the reveal will come next week after I’ve stained it! I was pretty familiar with what I was doing since I’d pressure washed the fence already, but I did check out this resource that had a quick and easy guide! One thing that I liked that they noted was to make sure your pressure washer is not on too high of a setting, because you can damage the wood (also can cause injuries to yourself as well if you’re not careful and wearing proper footwear). It also made me realized that I need to sand the deck as well before staining, so that will be another project for next week.

Speaking of the fence, I broke out the new can of stain this week to begin staining the fence. I didn’t get finished completely because it randomly started to rain (typical), but the difference was pretty shocking! I knew I picked a darker colour, but it was a little more drastic than I was expecting!

I like the colour of the natural wood but the dark stain is not as bad as last weeks fiasco so I think I will just learn to love it! I’m excited to see what a change it will make. My last little project of the week was tackling something new. The latch on the back gate was getting to be a bit of an issue as the latching mechanism didn’t line up properly and was pretty warped, so it made it a bit of a pain to open and close the gate! I picked up a new latch from Canadian Tire and found this great resource. This website was great because it really goes over everything, plus has some really helpful tips if you are needing to replace hinges! I did a good examination of the hinges on my gate and I think they will hold up for awhile longer, so I left them as is.

Installing the latch was pretty quick, although I’m glad I took the time to check out how to do it online (and not just because it is required for this class) because getting everything lined up was a bit trickier than I expected! But it works great and I’m pretty pleased with it now. I’m really looking forward to next week as I’m going to be attempting to lay down some grass seed to fix the big patches in our lawn, and then just finishing up the other big projects. The end is near and I’m excited to see everything come together!