DECK MAKEOVER ON A BUDGET

Hey guys, welcome back to our channel. Today we are going to be making over our back patio deck. I'm not really sure what to even call it. It's kind of like a balcony deck area that's right off of our living room. As you can see here, we've never done anything to this. The green paint on the back of the house is still the original color that it was when we moved in. We actually ran out of paint when we were painting the front of the house. And when that happened, we just never went and bought more paint to finish the back. So we are going to be tackling painting the entire back of the house as well as remodeling this deck area. So I'm just showing you all the different angles so you get a really good idea of what we're working with. We are going to make this look completely different back here. I wanted to show you guys a few close-ups of the actual deck. We were just going to paint it, but my husband wondered how this would look if it was sanded down. So that was actually the first thing we did is we wanted to sand some of this down, see what the wood looked like underneath. And if it looked nice, we were going to just leave it as it was and then just coat it with a clear coat. Okay, first I'm going to pull off these railings on each end and I'm going to replace them after I pull them off and sand underneath them. My brother-in-law has a like industrial wood floor sander he's going to bring, but it can't, it can only get within like eight to 10 inches of the sidewall. So I'm going to pull off the railings, sand there and re-put them back on just so my kids don't fall off them. But we're just going to sand the perimeter first and we'll see how it goes. Thomas spent several hours this first day sanding down just the edges of the deck and because he loved the color of it, we decided to call my brother who has done floors for over 20 years. He has a big sander and we knew that the time would just go by a lot quicker if we use his sander. This took him so long to just do it with a hand sander. If you don't have access to a giant sander, you can definitely do it with just a hand sander. However, it will probably take you all day if not a few days of just pure sanding. We also decided long before that we wanted to sand these beams down like we did on the other side of the patio in the back. We love the natural color of the beams, but again this took almost an entire day of just sanding the two beams and the cross beam across the top. So here's my brother with his giant sander. He literally did this in 40 minutes and we were just dying with how long it took my husband the day before to get just a little portion of the deck sanded. He literally did this in 40 minutes the entire deck and we were so in love with the color of the floor. So we decided just to leave it as is and we did go with a clear coat and we'll show you guys the exact kind of products that we used for this. I did want to give my brother a shout out. If you guys live anywhere in the Utah area, northern Utah, that's where we're from and you are wanting to get your floors done, I have my brother's contact information in the description box below. So be sure to check that out. He has been doing this for over 20 years like I mentioned before and his work is amazing. While he was sanding this, Thomas was getting the whole house ready to be painted. So you can see where we ran out of paint. We have half the fireplace was white, half the ceiling was white, and then we have this green back of the house which has just been driving me crazy for the longest time. So I can't even believe the world of difference it looks now that everything is white. The whole house looks completely different and I can't wait for you guys to see the difference in the next few minutes. We wanted the railings to be black so black spray paint was a really quick fix to just give these railings the desired look that we were going for. Once the back of the house was all white and we had the floor done, I wanted to paint this wall a different color and I had an idea of like a greenish blue gray color that would be a great accent over here in the corner. So I will have the exact color of this linked below if you guys are interested. Okay moving on to our first big build of this whole thing. We wanted a bench and I wanted it to be a three-seater. So I wanted to have three cushions on here so we could fit as much of our family on just one bench as possible. I will have the exact plans that we found on Pinterest linked below so you guys can look at those if you're interested. I'm piecing the arm together now. These are my measurements that I decided to do. These arm ones are 24 inches. I like to write it on it especially since I'm sanding it 24 inches for the arms both of them. This middle piece right here is 25 and a half inches because that's how wide the cushion is and I want it to fit just snug like right at the end. So this will actually the width of it will be different depending on the kind of cushion you get so just remember that. But if you want it like traditional height this is how you would want to build it. This top piece is 28 inches because you obviously have to account for the two by four sides. The last thing that I want to do is I want to know where I'm going to drill my pocket holes at. That's the most important thing right now because you don't want any of the pocket holes showing. So I'll go and mark. I want one here, here, and here. So that one's hidden and I'm coming up here. Now I know my pocket holes won't be showing. I'm still going to fill them just because I'm OCD but it won't be showing. So this will be where you sit at so 10 inches to the top of your two by four or your two by three. When it comes to this section I don't know why I put those two drawings there. I'm going to X those out. I'm going to do the two pocket holes here because obviously those will go in nothing. This one will actually go into the wood. What are you doing? You're making a house. Okay. You're making your house? Yeah. So we decided based off the measurements that one and a quarter, wait, one and three quarters inch between each of these made them even. That took a little bit of figuring out to do. Math decided. Math decided that. Yes. Well it wasn't on the instructions right? We didn't see that so. Look at that. I love it. I love it Ezra. Do you love it? This is the polycrylic I used as a top coat for this bench and we did between four and five coats of this. So once they were all the way dry I came back, did another coat. You want this to be as smooth as possible and we actually sanded it down just a little bit using just a piece of sandpaper with my hands. So we weren't going like crazy rough with anything. We were just lightly sanding the whole thing down after we did the fourth coat and then we did one more coat and it made it really really smooth. So that's just a little tip if you want your piece to be extra smooth. One little sand between coats will do the trick. Now for coating the deck. This is the materials that we used. Again I will have this linked in the description box if there's any questions. But I went ahead and did two coats on the deck and again I love how it turned out. It really made the color pop. Once this is dry you'll be able to see the difference of having it coated versus not having it coated and I just love the look of it. That light isn't centered on this wall. No it's not. Because it's not centered on the wall it's also not centered on one of these so it's like an annoying light. Do you do it centered with the light? Let's look let's step back and what do you think looks best like right there? I would yeah because if you didn't do it centered with a light then it would look really weird you know. So let's go center with the light. Okay by the way I was supposed to film this whole thing. I didn't know he would do it so fast. I think it's partially my fault because I feel like every time you're like go build this I'm like okay I'm going and then you're like dude we're supposed to film that. I just forget about that. Yeah he just cut a bunch of wood. I think you guys get the point. What I'm going to do here is I picked all of this up at Lowe's and I'm going to stain these. These are going to be little plant stands. So I'm going to paint these, stain these, cut these the length that I want for the stands to be different heights. Here's something else that I wanted kind of last minute. I wanted something above the sofa and I thought these little hexagon shelves would be perfect and so I will have the measurements listed in the description box but we did one of them at six inches and the other one at seven so it was just a little bit bigger. We have two at six inches and one at seven inches and then on each end we cut off 30 degrees so that it would make the perfect shape of the hexagon. I'm going to end the video here. We have thoroughly enjoyed this as a family the last few nights that we've had the sofa up here. We haven't had it all the way done but we have been enjoying it for the last couple days and I swear it's my favorite place to hang out now. The first thing I want to do when I wake up is go sit out there. I love the view from here. I'm just really glad that we got this done at the beginning of the summer so that we have all of the summer and the fall to enjoy this area. Thank you guys so much for watching and if you haven't hit that red subscribe button make sure that you do that and we will see you guys in the next video.