We are so close to finishing our deck. But we’re not done yet. With all the reclaimed deck wood we found on craigslist also came posts and railings people were getting rid of. They were all stained an ugly orangish color. We thought painting them white would look nice with our decorative posts and contrast nicely with our old deck boards.
The thought of painting all those spindles by hand made us want to cringe. The railings weren’t installed yet so we thought it would be easy to rent a paint sprayer to do the job. Yeah… “Easy”. In order to not have parts resting on the ground or having to flip it over to paint the other side we decided to hang it in the trees. Luckily at the last deck we got on Craigslist they were getting rid of these huge metal poles…so we rigged up a system in the trees to get ready to paint.
We rented the sprayer and got two gallons of outdoor latex paint. You have to thin out the paint with water so it doesn’t clog the sprayer so hopefully that would make our 2 gallons last longer. It all started out pretty simple and things were going well. That is until the sprayer wouldn’t spray evenly and some paint started dripping on the railings. Not the beautiful even coats I had pictured. I called the rental place and ran through all the troubleshooting steps that they had given me. Nothing was giving me that nice easy spray from when I started. I kept going even though I wasn’t sure how everything was turning out and pine needles were getting stuck on the posts when I leaned on the trees.
I only had a four hour rental so I sprayed till the two gallons were gone. I quickly showered to get the million tiny white paint dots off of me from when the wind would blow the paint right back in my face.
A few hours and a short rain shower later we went and checked out the damage. I’m not sure if it’s because I watered the paint down so much or they got a little wet in the rain but they looked sort of white washed. Hmm.. I think we can work with this!
Next step – installation, sand any big drips and then we’re going to go over it with some steel wool to create more of the faded white washed look.
I for one am glad that’s over. I really hope we don’t have any projects in the future that require a paint sprayer!
how to diy a cheap deck 1/3
how to diy a cheap deck 2/3
mauledbydesign 
What a great idea! I hope to see them soon!