Hicks House

Easter weekend was a busy weekend around the house. While most people were enjoying eating candy and spending time with family we were de-rocking the lawn and staining the deck (well Ken was anyway. I did housework inside.)

I know, I know your SUPER jealous. All of the advice we had heard and read online suggested letting the wood “season” for a year before treating it. Since we bought our house last June and the deck was already there we figured it had been about a year, and if it was going to get done this year it needed to happen before we put patio furniture on it.

Here is our deck last summer, all we did was move in and buy a nice 6-person table. And here is how it looked before we started the staining process/

We decided to go with this stain. Ken did LOTS of research and the reviews were heads above any other brands. The only catch? They didn’t sell it in any stores anywhere near us so we had to buy it online. Which meant we also had to just choose a color without seeing any in person samples at the store. What we really wanted was gray and white Trex decking… but this is real life where money doesn’t grow on trees and we are not rebuilding a perfectly good one year old deck. So we went with the light walnut color. We wanted it to be darker than the super light natural wood but not red or super dark.

So the three day process began with Ken cleaning the deck then brightening the wood. After that we let it dry for two days. Easter was the actual staining day. He went out to get started at 10 am and didn’t finish until 7pm. Needless to say it took WAY longer than either of us anticipated. We both thought it would maybe take 4-5 hours. Way, way wrong.

It also ended up coming out much darker than we envisioned.

Although slightly darker than intended I think it looks good. With all the rain we’ve been having the last few weeks we’ve been able to see the stain in action as the water just beads up on the surface rather than sinking into the wood.

All this rain has also prevented us from putting out our patio furniture and actually enjoying the deck… but at least the stain is working.

Here is New England it is finally finally been feeling like spring the past week or so (freak snow storm or two aside).

So you know what that means in New England? That’s right, yard work!

You may remember from some posts from last year like this one, this one, this one, and this one how last year we had a semi-dead/semi-crabgrass lawn.

Well now its all dead. Which may or not be better than crabgrass – we’re not sure, but what we know for sure is that as the onslaught of snow finally melted the neighbors all had green grass peeking through and we had brown. We are officially THAT house in the neighborhood, and most likely will be for another year or so.

With the long weekend Easter provided to Ken he decided to capitalize on the day off and take Thursday as well to get a leg up on the yard work. Before the lawn can be prepped to be re-seeded (most likely this fall) it needed to be de-rocked.

As you may or may not know the lot our home sits on used to be part of a Christmas Tree farm. When they leveled the lawn they left the majority of the roots in the soil (nice of them right). Along with all the roots were tons and tons of rocks. Many of the roots we pulled last year as they surfaced, but the rocks we left… until now.

Here is a picture of the front next to the driveway where you can see several piles of smaller rocks all around – and our lovely brown grass.

In the back was a spectacularly large ~~rock~~ boulder that required the help of a friend of ours and his pick up truck to remove.

So now the yard is de-rocked and awaiting a load of top soil to fill in all the newly created holes and level out the slump in the back that turns into a makeshift pond whenever it rains.

After all that hard work (that Ken did – I was at actual work not working nearly as hard) we unwinded by taking a wine blending class and creating our our custom Bordeaux wine blends!