Bojangles: Our "New" Deck

Our house is eight years old and has never had any sort of treatment done to the fence and deck. We have lived here three of those years and have failed to clean and stain it. We hired a professional because it was really bad (see before picture below!). Eduardo was great--he even fixed our top-of-the-stairs baby gate, which our dog had jumped on the day before, causing it to be pulled out of the wall.

Now I have one last thing to do before I'm completely happy with our grounds--install sod in the backyard. Well actually, it's a small yard so I would really like to just go ahead and put flagstone down and forget the grass altogether, but we priced it out and it was $7000! We aren't exactly to-it-yourselfers when it comes to stuff like that, just seems like something that we could potentially really screw up. Anyway, two years ago, I had the grass coming in strong and beautiful, but since we were none the wiser, we didn't allow it to establish itself and let our dog go potty back there and now we have a large dirt area :(. I don't want to put so much effort into the grass again, so I have decided to just install sod in that small area in the fall. I'm sure I'll post the before and after once that is complete!

So back to the deck--here is a good before/after while he was powerwashing. Just powerwashing looked amazing--I was impressed! The staining makes it look so nice too (once it dried it just looked like regular new wood):

I'm almost embarrassed to show this, but this is what are deck looked like before it was done. Notice the gross mildew stains and the oil stains from our old shotty grill.

And here is the after! Eduardo said the oil stains wouldn't come completely out, but he actually did a really good job of masking them--now it just looks like it's part of the wood.

So after we got the deck and fence done, we trashed our old furniture and grill and got a new bistro table and chairs and a new grill. John and I went back and forth on the grill for a long time. John wanted a charcoal/smoker grill and I wanted a gas grill. I know, I know--food tastes better on charcoal grills and the smoker would certainly be used by us since we love food slow cooked, but what was most important to me was the cleanliness. I HATE charcoal and cleaning that crap up. I couldn't get the picture out of my mind of my newly cleaned deck covered in charcoal soot. In the end, we found a nice grill that had both! We would mostly use it on the gas side, but when we were really in the mood for something to be smoked or grilled with charcoal, we will use the other part of it.

After three long hours of John putting the grill together, we put the little monkey to bed and enjoyed a few hours on our deck grilling, eating, and chatting. It was so nice. Here is John grilling away! Filet Mignon for me and Turkey Burgers for John: