Finishing touch...

The deck was sadly gray and black at the beginning of summer; better after being pressure washed. Not bad, actually, considering its age... near as we can remember, we built it the summer of 1988 with the help of a friend and his 3-year-old son. Riley's little handprint and the date are still visible on one of the concrete footings.

DWs new orbital sander did a great job of taking off the worst of the rough wood, and I cleaned up underneath the drip edge and the edges of all the boards using the leftover 60- and 80-grit sanding disks (by hand!).

And then we waited for the weather to cooperate. We needed three solid days of dry weather: a day for the deck to dry after a couple of days of rain, 6 hours to stain the deck, and two days of drying time.

The weather cooperated, thank goodness. We had enough time to get the deck stained and dry, finishing just before nightfall. To keep it dry in case of  heavy dew, we spread tarps and let it dry another day. We finished up the stairs the next morning, and I took pictures so we'd remember how light the wood was when the stain went down.

We had to cross our fingers with the stain color, because it wasn't available at the lumber store. They ordered it for us, and it was exactly what we wanted.