2014 Birthday Week Part 1 of a Few

We really only had one goal during birthday week and that was to get the sun room deck painted.  Anything more would have been vegetarian gravy.

The weather forecast was not promising.  Checking it on the Friday that we left (July 25th), it seemed like most days had about a 40% chance of thundershowers.  So just enough to not feel real confident about forging ahead, but not enough to cancel plans altogether either.  Needing three days between deck scrubbing and actual painting, we circled Christine's birthday as scrub day, mine as paint day.

We dedicated a fair amount of time on Saturday to scraping out the crap between the deck boards, using a butter knife (since discarded, so worry not, visitors) and a scraper. Lonely work...

We went back to Ottawa on the Sunday because the weather looked to be awful in Crow Lake that day anyway.  At home, we caught up with our respective sports addictions and returned Monday morning, eager (?) to start cleaning some deck!  Yeah!

But before we get into those days, we must digress.

On the way home on Sunday, Christine remembered something we'd been meaning to do for a spell.  The black TV stand always seemed out of place in the living room at the cottage (*creepy reflection warning*).

We had a similarly-sized piece of furniture in the garage that looked like it might be more appropriate.  Christine couldn't quite recall its history, but things cleared up real quick when I tried (and failed) to fit it into the trunk of the car and saw this:

It says "To Paul From Dad" for those of you who don't want to flip your computer monitors upside down.

So a perfect cottage fit on several levels.  Isn't this much better, my creepy reflection notwithstanding?  Of course it is.

With that taken care of, we set out to clean the deck.  It took nearly three hours in a constant drizzle which was actually helpful to clear the icky brown goop that we were creating with the brushes.  But it did clean it, and now I'm curious as to what the other decks around the place would look like with a proper scrub.  I might have found a productive way to pass the time the next time we get a steady rain.  But probably not.