Power Washer

Early Tuesday morning I was going to spend 15 or 20 minutes washing part of the deck so that I could spend the latter part of the morning painting on the sealer. To do the stoop and 7 boards took two hours [by the way, two hours is not 15 minutes] of scrubbing vigorously, and it resulted in aching knees, sore shoulder muscles, and a weak grip in my hands.

Ah, but look at how beautifully it cleaned up!


Wednesday morning's goal was moving the game shelves to the unfinished portion of the basement, and rearranging other bookshelves down there. But I found water! Everybody else in the metro area is cleaning up from last week's flooding, but my basement stayed dry through the torrential rains. Finding Wednesday's puddles, I gave up on the basement cleaning/sorting/rearranging, and let the fans and the dehumidifiers do their thing. (Later we discovered that the water was due to a broken hose in the water softener. Not too hard to repair. And --woohoo!-- not a serious problem with leaks in the foundation.)

So instead, on Wednesday I went out to the deck to tackle more scrubbing. But I wilted. Too exhausted from the previous day's efforts, I couldn't seem to hold the brush tight enough nor scrub with enough pressure to effectively clean the planks. I gave up. I rented the power washer recommended for decks.

Botched that too. Trying to make the boards look as bright and clean as what I'd accomplished on hands-and-knees, I power-washed too close, too hard. Andrew noticed I was creating sawdust. Oh NO! So I changed my methods, but that didn't seem to actually get the boards clean.

Well, they're as clean as they're going to get before I paint the sealer on. My only hope is that a couple of years of sun and rain will weather the boards into looking like maybe they might kinda sorta match, maybe a little bit. Next time I have to seal, there will be no power-washer on the deck!!!

And then I couldn't find the celery for supper. Whine whine whine. One of these days I'm going to be digging in the freezer for frozen vegetables, and find a frozen stalk of celery in the bottom of a grocery bag.

How many things can a person ruin in one day?? At least the day ended on an improved note: being treated to preaching and the Lord's Supper in the early evening, and being treated to beer, laughs, and stories at a little bier garten in Germantown after church.