Fixin' The Deck Part 16

Good grief, it's almost the end of January! Whatever I've been doing for the last few weeks, it has not involved writing in this blog! At the start of the year, it was raining, but fortunately the majority of the preparation for re-installation the deck railings was accomplished inside. The first item on the agenda was picking through the old hardware:

Most of the post brackets came out ok after going over with wire wheel, but I will have to buy a couple of replacements; a post anchoring set is $30 bucks and I need thirteen (13), so it was well worth cleaning up the ones I can reuse.

Very few of the L-brackets were salvageable, so I ordered replacements and I will also be getting new lag bolts. 

This is what the pile of railing components looks like after eighteen months of sitting in the back yard. I should have covered the parts with a tarp, but instead they have been covered with decomposing leaves for most of that time and have the stains to prove it.

It was still raining at this point, but I did my best to ignore it, set up the pressure washer, and worked my way through all the railing components. Pressure washing in the rain isn't much worse than doing it on a dry day because I always manage to hose myself down.

Pressure washing was a big help, but I wasn't able to remove the worse stains, so I set up my paint both in the backyard and worked my way through the mountain of parts.

Stains like this....

.....were essentially eliminated with Rust-oleum gloss enamel and everything looks way better:

The gutters and the gates were pressure washed and painted after it stopped raining:

Next up: stucco repair. I had to bust out some of the stucco outside the dining room to get the old deck boards out, and it has never been repaired. There are a few other places where the stucco has been damaged including next to the garage where I removed an obsolete hose bib, but this is the big one. To start with I removed all the loose stucco and peeled back the good material a couple more inches to expose the framing. I cut out the remaining bits of original wire mesh and patched the tar paper behind the stucco. I then installed a piece of much finer mesh over the tar paper and took the photo below:

The next photo was taken after the first coat of replacement stucco has been applied. I'm not the best at masonry so I studied on youtube ahead of time. I am using a 3/4 in. piece of scrap wood to ensure there is straight gap between the lower edge of the stucco and the aluminum flashing:

The second or "textured" coat is applied before the initial round of stucco has completely cured:

After complete curing and painting with primer. It would have been much more difficult to make this repair with the deck enclosure installed. 

To be continued....