I am terrible when it comes to maintenance, which is why it has been about 12 years since I sealed our deck (or even cleaned it). Sealing a deck isn’t hard, I’m just really good at not maintaining things.
As our two readers know, I am also not good at documenting home improvements. Luckily, this time I at least remembered to take a picture before we sealed the deck. I just didn’t get a picture of it before I pressure washed it. Just look at the photo above and picture it covered with black and green. It was bad.
For years I’ve wanted to expand our deck so it wasn’t so tight and add another set of stairs to walk directly into the back yard so that I could save 5 steps walking to the shed. Alas, that is a couple projects back on the list. Next up in our home improvement plans is to get the attic insulated, which we will be paying someone else to do.
When we do get a new deck, we are going to bump it out towards the back yard a few feet and have it replaced with Trex or some other composite decking that doesn’t require as much maintenance as wood.
We actually planned to seal the deck last year, but we ran into the start of the kitchen remodel and had to push it off. Christy did some research last year and found DeckCorrect by Cabot.
If you have not used DeckCorrect, it is very thick and covers well. I believe the guy at Lowes said it has sand in it, but my experience is that the workers at Lowes don’t know anything and are just talking out of their ass.
The product says that you can apply it with a stain brush or a 3/8″ nap roller, but our family motto is “Making do”, so we just used the old paint brushes and some 1/2″ nap rollers that we already had on hand.
We initially thought we could cover it with 2 cans, but our deck was in such bad shape we had to buy 4 (total $140.52). Even with that, it did not fill all of the cracks. From not maintaining it for so many years some of the cracks are so deep I think I would need to pour it on the boards and then roll it out.
This was a team effort as well. Christy did all of the detail work and I did most of the stuff that you can just glop it on. I’m a pretty good glopper.
It’s not perfect, but we’ve lived with it being a mess for so long, it’s like a new deck to us. I can’t wait until it’s fully cured so we can get the grill on the deck. I covered over all of my burn marks where I dropped hot coals, so I’m itchin’ to get some new burn marks on there.
