On moving into our Minnesota house in 2021 one project was on our radar from the start, the deck needed refinishing. We had raw wood for the floor that'd require sealing at some point and the white fencing around the deck and stairs was in bad shape. It was going to be a ton of work and I was not looking forward to it, but it wasn't going to prevent us from buying the house either. At least it wasn't an urgent problem and it got put on the back-burner for the first year plus.
By this last spring the situation required immediate attention. The white paint on the top horizontal surface, which I'd refer to as the 'top rail,' was fraying so bad it was coming off in chunks. It looked awful. Some of the other horizontal surfaces were also in somewhat poor condition but the top was the worst, unsurprisingly. This is altogether frustrating, btw, because our house (and presumably the deck) was built in 2018, five/six years prior. I learned from my neighbor that the previous owner had painted the deck and I realized he hadn't done any prep work, no sanding or anything, and just slapped the paint on the rough wood. No wonder it was already coming undone. I'd do better.
The top priority was, as already mentioned, the top rail on the fencing. I needed to either remove enough of the white paint to repaint it in a quality way or, better yet, strip all the white off and stain the top with the same color I'd use later on the floorboards. I thought this was be more durable and look nicer, though it wasn't clear I'd be able to entirely remove the white. Sanding by hand was useless except the patches where I could basically remove it with my hands. Citrus stripper also got me where poor results. Then I went to the store and got some very low grit (60-80), durable sanding pads and got to work with my orbital sander. The answer, of course, was power tools.
Progress was steady but almost painfully slow. Where the white remained, and wasn't falling off, it was on good. Simply removing the white paint from the top rail took a good number of days, usually working an hour or two at a time. I went through a bunch of sanding pads. But the work did get done. The staining part was incredibly quick by comparison, all in one day I think, maybe a couple hours total. All that was difficult there was taking care not to spill the stain or have it drip down onto the white below, as it would be staying that color. It was clear from this stage that I'd need to continue working, carefully, from the top down to minimize spillage considering I'd be staining/painting the deck with two colors. Up to then I was eager to start working on the floorboards but it got pushed off.
Next was the white fencing below the top rail. With this I didn't need to take off all the white, though the lower horizontal bars required more sanding than the rest, I just needed to properly prep the surfaces to best accept the white paint. So I sanded every surface, generally twice, once with a really rough grit (<100) and again with something more medium (like 150). This was tough where I needed to be reaching over the top and where there were tight spaces, like between the spindles on the outside and between the flat deck and the stairs going down. It felt like I'd be sanding all summer long, and that's kind of how it went.
When I did finish sanding the flat deck portion I painted it white. To help complete this I purchased a nice all-in-one ladder, which I can adjust to different heights and was tremendously helpful. The painting itself was multiple long days of very tedious work using brushes and a mini roller. Those spindles are obnoxious to do. After doing the flat deck I started over with the stairs, sanding and sanding and sanding and eventually painting.
I joked through the summer that I wanted to finish this project before it snowed. After first troubleshooting in May, time kept marching on and I worked on it when I could, usually a few days a month. And I got the worst looking part, the top rail, and (almost) all the white fencing done before that first snow came in October (yes, it already happened). I did some final touch-ups this last weekend (the first in November), the two posts at the bottom of the stairs and the actual handrail, and now I'm done with the white. The floorboards and the stairs (and maybe more than that) will have to be a next year project. It never ends.
What's done now looks super nice and I'm very happy with it. When I get to the floors it'll look even better. Hopefully it holds up this time, I'd like to not do this again anytime soon.
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