Adventures in Porch Renovation

           So we have this beautiful, three-sides-of-the-house wraparound porch, more than eight feet wide, with recessed lighting, two sets of chairs on either end, and a beautiful pine paneled ceiling. It was the feature that first drew me to the house. It's wide enough for Eva to ride her bike back and forth on. It's great.

            I had a few big projects lined up for this year, to be finished before the first snow:

            (1) Stain the rear deck;

            (2) Build a woodshed beneath the deck;

            (3) Fill said woodshed with firewood;

            (4) Remediate the high radon count in the basement;

            (5) Stain and urethane the porch ceiling.

I've always wanted, as part of my big wraparound porch, to have a maritime-looking ceiling of richly stained reddish gold, gleaming brightly with a shiny finish. And I was going to have that by snowfall this year, by gum.

            The house has a number of other minor problems, the worst being the radon and bad or absent flashing on the two exterior doors from the kitchen, leading to the deck and the porch. The deck flashing is fixed, and hopefully the carpenter ants living in the formerly wet wood are no longer so happy. Soon enough we'll have an exterminator come make sure. But when we had the deck flashing repaired, the carpenter looked at the deck itself and remarked that it needed preservative.

            "I know," I answered. "I plan to let it dry for a few more days and then stain it."

            "You should pressure wash it first," he told me, "that'll allow the stain to seep that much farther into the wood."

            "I don't want to get the wood any wetter than it already is,though. It's been raining quite a bit for the past few weeks."

            "The mold and mildew which grows on the wood impedes moisture from leaving. The wood will actually dry more quickly if you pressure wash it first."

            Now that remark struck me. I wouldn't have guessed that. (Too bad I hadn't asked around and gotten that advice last year, when I tried to stain the deck at the farmhouse. A month later, the pigment was peeling off the moldy, still-wet wood.) I snooped around a bit online, and asked a few other carpenters, and got confirmation of what he'd told me. Pressure washing is the first step in rehabbing wood that hasn't been preserved in a while.

            So I went to the local hardware store that Saturday, rented the pressure washer, brought it home and got ready to work. I figured two days would be enough. On day one, I'd tackle the deck and the beams along the base of the porch, the unstained ones that support the floorboards, and which you can see from the yard. On day two, I'd zip through the porch ceiling.

            That afternoon I got going on the deck, a little later than I'd hoped, but still, making good progress. The pressure washer was a gas-powered motor running an air compressor and merging the compressed air with water from our garden hose. Three hours on the deck and I was done. An hour on the porch support beams and I was done with those. I was feeling pretty good about myself when we sat down for dinner.

            The next day was Sunday, and Kate was taking the kids to church, to be followed by an afternoon cookout. They'd be home by about four or five, by which time I figured to have the porch ceiling thoroughly washed. After perhaps a week of drying, it'd be ready to stain. Kate left and I fired up the pressure washer and got to work.

            The first thing I noticed was, washing something over my head is a lot more awkward than washing something under my feet. Specifically, I was getting soaked, and very cold. Perhaps it was just inexperience, or some native stupidity shining through, but it took me over an hour to work out a comfortable angle to hold the wand--the long metal rod that the combined air/water mix came shooting out of--at which the wood would be cleaned, and I wouldn't get soaked. But by that time I was already soaked, so the first day was kind of a loss that way.

            The next issue had cropped up within the first five minutes, however. I had assumed that the job would be quick and easy, a light pass of the water jet over wood that wasn't very dirty, as it wasn't exposed to sun or rain, and wasn't walked on. Except, the opposite was true. A few quick sweeps back and forth with the wand showed the wood to be a bit lighter, but when I slowed the wand down to change direction, I noticed that the wood was far cleaner, looking a bright golden-orange, there. And pretty quickly it dawned on me: this wood, not sanded, with plenty of roughness to trap dust and mold spores, was even dirtier, for being rough, always in the shade, and protected from rain which would pelt it and wash spores away. The porch ceiling was not a quick, easy cleaning job. Not at all. On the contrary: it was going to be a long, slow, tedious, neck-straining, sore-shoulder job.

            And worse than that: after an hour and a half, the pressure washing stream failed. It just stopped. But the motor was still running. I let it sit idle for a few minutes, and then tried again. Still nothing. I started getting a bad feeling, turned off the motor, shut off the hose, went inside the house, and tried the kitchen faucet.

            Nothing.

            I went down to the basement bathroom, and tried that faucet.

            Nothing.

            I went to the water pump, and turned it off and then back on.

            No sound of water rushing in.

            Then I realized the main limitation of using a pressure washer: you need lots and lots of water. I'd been running the hose at full blast, pretty much, for four and a half hours that day. Of course I'd killed the well. In retrospect, it was pretty stupid of me to not anticipate this.

            So now I had to sheepishly call Kate, tell her I'd killed the well, and ask her to buy several gallons of bottled water on her way home. She graciously did this, and even more graciously didn't scold me when she got home. We had dinner, she eating patiently and I in morose silence. I couldn't shower, which probably wasn't all that necessary since I'd been dripping wet anyway, but it left me feeling even more dissatisfied.

            I got up early the next morning and the water was back on. Encouraged, I made the morning coffee, and once Kate had taken off with the kids for Eliot's preschool, I got to work again on the porch. I figured, two hours a day and no more, and I'd have the porch licked in three more days. That was three more days than I'd planned on, but as contingencies go, I could do worse.

            And I did do worse. After an hour and a half, the pressure washer stream failed again. I turned the motor off, shut off the hose, and checked the kitchen faucet.

            I'd killed the well again.

            Since it was earlier in the day, I was hoping that the water would come back by evening, and Kate would never know.

            No such luck.

            So the poor woman was now heading into her third day without a shower. I was better off because I'd been drenched both days, even though I was shivering cold. But now I was looking at an increasingly impaired well, less than halfway done with the cleaning, with lumps of wet sawdust covering the side of the house.

            See, that's what a pressure washer can do, so you have to be careful with it: the stream of water can actually cut wood, so you have to keep it moving at all times, or it starts to dig a channel into the wood you're aiming at. If you were to look closely at the wood I'd cleaned, you'd notice many areas where I'd slowed down with the stream and gouged the wood a bit. But that's what leaves the wood so clean: the pressure washer was actually removing anywhere from one-sixteenth to one-thirty-second of an inch of wood, exposing a clean surface underneath. And it did look good.

            But the washed-off wood, sort of a lumpy paste, settled wherever. On the walls of the house facing the porch. On the railings. On the floor. On the grass. On me. It was a mess. A really, really, ugly, bad mess. And it was only halfway done. And now I had to wait for a few days, plainly, for the well to recover before I could get back to work.

            In an ugly state of mind, I brought the pressure washer back to the hardware store that afternoon, having rented it for two more days than I'd planned, and knowing that I'd need at least three more. Also knowing that I had to wait a week, with the porch area looking like a disaster zone, unable to use my hose to clean anything off. I was feeling pretty discouraged. And even though Kate valiantly continued to make no complaints, it wasn't until the following evening that our water returned sufficiently for her to take a small shower.

            I had plenty of other things, like the woodshed, to work on in the meantime. But I was still brooding over the porch. A week later I went back to the hardware store, got the pressure washer and brought it home, this time with a grim determination to finish the job. An hour and a half maximum, every day, until I was done. That was the plan.

            Except that I made it only an hour and a quarter on the first day before killing the well again. Now this time I was ready--I had ten gallons of water in jugs in the basement--and Kate had gotten a shower that morning. But I still couldn't believe how low the well still was. I started feeling grateful that I hadn't killed it altogether. But I decided I'd have to wait one full day before trying again. So, two days later, I tried again. One hour got me across the entire front of the porch, with only a small section of wraparound remaining, and I didn't kill the well this time. I could taste it now.

            The next morning I got up, calmly confident, and got to work. Forty-five minutes later, the job was done.  Three killings of the well, one full week of rental (Kate was right: it might have been cheaper for me to buy one of those things), and one horrendous mess later, the entire porch ceiling was clean It was a warm yellow with a reddish grain, just inviting a good coat of stain and then some preservative. But seeing as how the wood never saw sunlight, and only ventilated on one side, I wanted to let it dry for at least two weeks before applying stain. So I got back to work on staining the deck, and the floor beams, and getting the big pile of wood out of the driveway and into the shed.

            An inspection job fell through, and I found myself with two addtional weeks at home. Where I'd assumed that I'd be rushing the staining/urethaning job in October, with days barely warm enough for work, I now had four straight days of 70+ degrees to do it. And I did.

            First I taped and tarped off the house and railings. Sort of like the pressure washing, what I'd assumed would be a quick job was very slow. Instead of three or four hours, it took me twelve or thirteen. Then I rented the spray gun. Unfortunately, urethane is too gluey to spray, so once I was done with the stain, I was going to be using a brush. Forty-five minutes with the sprayer and I was done. The work went so quickly that I didn't have any time to improve my technique by the time I'd finished. And that meant I left stripes all over the ceiling, where I'd stopped sweeping the sprayer in one direction, and started moving it in the other direction. So I had a red-and-purplish zebra stripe effect.

            When Kate got home she either put on a brave face, or honestly wasn't very concerned, because she looked at the red-and-purple stripes and said, "Hmm, yeah, I can see them ,but they're not too obvious." I think she was trying to make me feel better, because later she suggested rolling some paint thinner over the purple parts. I agreed, and I tried, and it sort of worked: the stripes were a little more blurry, not quite as sharply defined. But they definitely weren't gone.

            So I figured, somewhat desperately, that once I'd put on the urethane, the urethane itself would even out the tone somewhat. I was really, really hoping this. I mean, urethane does darken wood! Especially the oil-based stuff, which I was using.

            So now started the most difficult and annoying part of the job, by far. Yes, the pressure washing was annoying, but mostly because I kept killing the well, not because it was difficult. If I'd had a water truck instead of the well, I could have done the whole job in one afternoon, or at least by noon of the next day. The machine was doing all the work. I was just aiming it. And the staining was even easier than I'd expected, which is why I wound up screwing it up so badly.  It almost made me angry that it wasn't tougher.

            But urethane is too thick for sprayers (well, for ordinary sprayers you can rent from the hardware store, anyway. Maybe there's a super-duper one out there that can handle it--I bet NASA or the Air Force or Navy has a few). Anyway, I was going to have to brush it on. I was hoping that the job would take four hours, or even six. Two coats--though the instructions on the cans recommended three for outdoors--in two or three days.

            Put on my painter's hat (a ratty old Iron Man cap), my crappiest jeans and sneakers, and one of the T-shirts that's really old and holey which Kate hates. And long rubber gloves. Then I got to work.

            Pretty soon it became clear that this was more like an 8-to-10-hour job. Craning my neck back--the ceiling is a hair over seven feet tall, so I can reach it without a stool, but not without leaning back and arching my neck--and relying mostly on my stronger right arm, I went slowly along. I didn't quite finish the entire porch on the first day--8 hours left me with about ten feet undone, but it was 6 PM and I was getting hungry.

            I was also covered in urethane, to the point that my clothes were beyond salvage. So I dumped them all in the back yard, got a shower, and picked out another set of expendable shoes and T-shirt for the next day. I was up and at it by 8:30 AM. It was a Saturday, and Kate took Eva and Eliot out for the day, so I was on my own with my Felger & Mazz sports podcast, a brush, my ratty clothes, and six gallons of urethane. It's gluey stuff, and especially with the second coat, it can be hard sometimes to see which portions you've already brushed, and which you haven't. I had to walk in circles sometimes, looking at a patch of ceiling from several different directions, to see if it was more or less reflective than the area around it.

            But mostly I was just getting progressively stickier and more sore, even as I made steady headway. Several times I thought about putting the brush down and do the remainder on Sunday. But I knew I'd curse myself as a lazy slob, and worse, that there was a decent chance I wouldn't bother to finish the job. I knew pushing on now was my only guarantee of finishing.

            And I did, though not before Kate and the kids came home. I'd been hoping to be done, feel like a boss, clean up and have the shining porch ceiling ready for them to see when they walked up. Instead, the porch was still a mess of tarps and tape, plastic was still all over the front of the house, and I was a sweating mess dripping with curses and urethane. But I was almost done.

            And when I did finish, and decided against doing a third coat on Sunday, and pulled down the plastic, I didn't feel like a boss, but I did feel relieved. I'd finished the job, we'd have a warm, inviting porch that wasn't growing moldier by the day, and I hadn't even killed the well a fourth time. And you know what? The urethane did even out the stripes. If you look hard, you can still see them. But they don't slap you in the face like a neon sign saying "INCOMPETENT!"

           Now I've got my force-field-of-inviting-warmth porch . And I've also got my outdoor slippers-on coffee comfort station. Home improvement, accomplished.