Cleaning up the Deck

We've been doing some work to clean up and reorganise our back deck. It had become cluttered and was filthy and was just becoming a bit of a mess. It is such a great entertaining area and with summer coming up we will be using it a lot more so we decided it was time to do something about it. Here is the before shot:

We spent a while shuffling through a bunch of ideas and discarded a lot of them because they were either too hard or we couldn't afford them. One of the big things was we needed to clean the deck and stain it because we hadn't done it since we moved in and that isn't a good thing for a deck. So we started cleaning it using wood cleaning stuff. The difference was amazing. We didn't realise how dirty it was until we started cleaning it. Unfortunately it is back breaking work even with the cleaning stuff because the deck is so dirty. Add to that we measured we have 65 sqm of deck so we're doing it in chunks.

We decided we needed some new pots and plants so we bought those and then tossed up between putting a bamboo screen or building a sort of under deck planter box along the back planted with something to screen the lattice, but decided it was a bit too much work. In the end I built a 3m long planter box out of some timber sleepers we had left over from when we removed the pond out the front. Using the old timber was good for the environment (reusing!) and saved us some money. Plus I got to use power tools! Anyway, here is a couple of photos of where we are up to. Click on the links for bigger pictures:



It all looks a bit bare at the moment, but there is still much to do! We're going to put nice timber slats along the front of the planter box and fill it with small lillipillis after the soil arrives (it holds about 500L of soil!). The idea being it will screen the lattice in the back. We still have to stain the deck. It looks quite dark in the picture because of all the rain over the weekend. We also have a shade sail that we will rig up over the spa so that we can swim in the shade in summer. It is one we can put up and take down as we need it. We're also going to get a little wooden bench for the left hand side. Aside from that we're not really sure what else to do, but I'm sure we'll come up with something.