Complete Deck Makeover Part 1 Cleaning the Deck

This post may contain affiliate links, which means we may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.

This post is the part I of out deck makeover, which will include:

Cleaning the deck

You can wash the full video below

I will also include tips to make the process go smoothly, tell you what not to do based on my mistakes that will save you time and money.

I will also link all the tools and materials I used during this makeover

I’ve been wanting to give my deck a makeover for the the last couple of years, finally decided to do it this year.

If you are thinking about giving your deck a major makeover, I’m going to warn you right now it’s a lot of work, way more work than I realized! But it’s so worth it at the end.

We are currently on week 8 and we are still not done. Theoretically we could it finished this in a month, but because we are doing this between working full time, Aiden’s nap time and also the weather (because you can’t paint a deck if its going to rain in 24 hours and if it has rained less than 24 hours ago) it’s taking a long time.

A quick summary of all the steps to prep your deck before painting/staining it

STEP 1
Remove everything from the deck
STEP 2
Clean the deck
STEP 3
Let the deck dry from 24-48 hours
STEP 4
Sand down any fuzzies that was caused by the pressure washer (se picture below), as well as any rough spots.
STEP 5
Fix any popping nails by hammering it down or replacing them.
STEP 6
Replace any broken boards
STEP 7
clean the deck of any sand dust from sanding it down (I used my RYOBI xxxxx leaf blower)
STEP8
You are ready to paint

Cleaning the deck

I did not realize how dirty and the deck was until we actually washed it, I included a before and after pic below.

There are a couple of options when cleaning your deck

Sanding it

Using a cleaning solution and scrubbing the deck

Pressure washing it (we used this RYOBI pressure washer)

What we did

We decided to go with pressure washing, although if I had to do this over again, I would have applied a cleaning solution like this wood and deck cleaner first, which we actually did end up using on the floors after. Then pressure washing it.

The pressure washer was not actually on when my toddler was holding it

If you own your home I would definitely recommend purchasing a pressure washer, but if you don’t want to purchase one you can rent one at Home Depot or Lowes , they both cost about $80 a day to rent. We decided to purchase one since we own our home, we went with the 2900 PSI.

Here is a blog post I found to help you pick the right pressure washer, I included a visual chart below from that blog post.

Image credit: https://www.verellenhc.com/blog/pressure-washer-psi-chart

TIP– Be careful not to have the pressure washer too close to the wood so it does not damage the wood, we made this mistake so we ended up having to do a lot of sanding after.

Once you are done cleaning the deck let it dry for 24-48 hours

Prepping the deck after cleaning

Sanding the deck after cleaning it

Because we were not too careful when pressure washing so we ended up with lots of fuzzies, so we had a lot of sanding to do. But from all the research I did it is recommended to sand your deck before painting because it helps the wood adhere to the paint better.

The most annoying part was sanding between the railings because it’s a tight spot. I used both my orbital sander and a block sander because my orbital sander didn’t fit between the rails.l