I think this is going to turn into a bit of a rant here so please bare with me...

Over the last couple of days I have been taking advantage of the unseasonably warm first week of November here in Southern Ontario (on Monday the high was around 15C, Tuesday it was almost 20C and today is supposed to be the same ) to get my deck refinished before the snow started flying. Of course I should have done this in say, September, when I woud have had a little more time and but I was stupid and didn't do it then.

I don't have a small deck. No, that would be too easy. We didn't build this deck, it was already here when we moved in about a year and a half ago. I just did the calculations on the size of the deck and it is about 520 square feet or around 48 square meters. Not small. My brother rented a condo in Toronto for a couple of years that was just over 20% bigger than our deck. Like I said, not small.

For some reason I thought that sanding the deck to get all the previous stain off would be a bad idea. I'm not sure why I thought that but I did. I think part of the reason was I thought it would be expensive to rent a floor sander which I will get to later. So I decided to go the chemical method. I bought some deck stripper stuff that promised to remove the stain and also remove the little wood fibers that usually give a deck that fuzzy look after it has been stripped. The deck stripper stuff seemed like it would be so easy. The instructions said that you slop the stuff on, let it sit for awhile until the finish starts to lift, scrub it with a deck scrubbing brush and then hose it off. Easy, right? Yeah, ok you just go ahead and believe that.

The instructions on the stripping solution said that it will lift reasonably deteriorated surface finished. What it should say is that if it looks like the finish could be scraped off with a wire brush, then the stripper should be able to take it off. After spending about 3 hours applying the solution to the deck and then using a pressure washer to wash it off I was actually able to get about 30% of the stain off the deck. I think that if I had just used the pressure washer I would have been able to get about 20% of the stain off the deck. The next day I decided to try again. So I spent another 3 hours applying the solution and washing it off. Not a whole lot of difference. By this point I had spent just over $60 on the stripping solution. Then I had to spend another $20 on a solution to clean off the stripping solution so the wood could be stained.

Total spent about $80 and approximated 8-9 hours of work.

When I was in the hardware store buying the cleaner solution I took a look at what it would cost to rent a floor sander. I had thought that a floor sander was a big bulky thing that would cost over $100 to rent for a day and that wouldn't fit in the trunk of a car. The floor sander I saw was much smaller than I thought (I think the sanding drum was probably 8-9 inches wide, I was imagining a sanding drum about 16-18 inches wide) and I think it would fit in a reasonable sized car trunk (provided the back seats fold down). It would almost definitely fit in the trunk of my Jetta with the back seats down. And the kicker? It costs just over $50 to rent for 24 hours.

I think that in the time it took me to pressure wash the deck once I could have had the entire deck sanded. Even if it took me twice as long as pressure washing the deck I would have been further ahead time wise because I had to wash the deck 3 times total and I had to apply the stripping solution before I washed it off. So for the price that I paid for the stripping solution I could have rented the sander. Then I would have had to pay for the actual sandpaper but I wouldn't expect that to cost more than say $15-$20 and it would have saved me at least 4 hours of time. That's less than minimum wage!

Maybe it wasn't warm enough to use the stripping solution, maybe the wood wasn't dry enough when I started, maybe the deck could have survived the winter with just some minor stain touch ups, I don't know. I do know that I am never going to attempt to use a chemical stripper on my deck again. I'll spend the $50 and rent a floor sander so that I can actually get the whole deck ready for a new coat of stain in a day instead of spending 2 days and having to wonder if I got enough of the old stain off for the new stain to stick properly.

So my advice to anyone looking to refinish their deck (which for most people probably won't be until the spring now) is just rent a floor sander. If your deck is bigger than around 150 square feet (15 square meters) the expense of the floor sander will be about the same as the expense of the stripping solution but the sander should actually work and you don't have to worry if it is too cold or if the wood isn't quite dry enough or if the sun comes out and drys up the solution before the finish is lifted or, or, or... Just sand it and save yourself a whole lot of aggravation. I know next time that's what I'll be doing. Either that or replacing the deck boards with that wood composite stuff that doesn't need staining.