Painting and Crafting

Today I painted the deck. This is a project that has been on the house to-do list since the day we moved in. Maybe even BEFORE we moved in. It feels good to finally cross it off the list. It also felt good to just make this part of the house look so much better. Here are a couple of before shots of the steps and the deck:


And here it is, after. Actually, this is technically in the middle, since I haven't been able to reach the very top parts. Jake will finish this off on Friday.

We used Sikkens Cetol SRD in "Dark Oak." It got good ratings on Consumer Reports, and, perhaps more importantly, only required one coat. It's also supposed to be a good option for decks such as ours that may (or may not) contain arsenic. We don't know the details of when our deck was built, but apparently this sort of wood, if made before 2004, was probably treated with arsenic. And if that's the case, we don't really want to be sanding it, what with all that arsenic then being freed into our air and lungs. So we just did a very thorough washing with a homemade recipe of Oxy-Clean and Borax a couple days ago. Applying the stain took about 4 hours and used almost a gallon of the SRD. Since it's a stain, it won't peel like paint would, which means that the next time we have to treat it, we won't have to sand then, either. Oh, also in the "note to self" category, we only needed one gallon, not the two that I bought. We can return the un-opened can; I figured it was better to have extra than to have to run out halfway through the job (a regular occurrence during most of our home-improvement projects).

I got the stain at Harmon's Paint & Wallpaper, a very friendly place downtown. After I bought the deck stain, I asked if they had any discontinued wallpaper books they were looking to get rid of. A very kind lady took me to the back room and showed me just what I wanted -- a terrific book of children's wallpaper samples (happens to be Ralph Lauren). I know, you're wondering, what exactly am I planning to do with a book of wallpaper samples? Redecorating a room in 18X15-inch squares? (Actually, that might look pretty cool.) Nope, I'm doing some paper crafts, and I read a suggestion for recycling wallpaper scraps, so I figured a sample book would be perfect. And it is!

Last night I was playing with fabric, and staring at the new chicken print fabric I bought a while ago. I was compelled to make a stuffed chicken.

In the background there, you can see my first wallpaper project: I covered one of Lucy's formula cans, since the first one has been such a hit.

In other news updates, Lucy is officially crawling. I put her down in the pink room while I went to get her dinner ready, and by the time I came back, she had crawled over to Carter's box of toys. She can really move now. Time to invest in some baby-gates.