I Was Just Going to Clean the Deck

By now I’ve come to the conclusion that southern Sweden has two springs: a cold one and a warm one. It’s quite different from northern Sweden, where spring mostly consists of staring at several feet of snow and hoping it eventually disappears. With that in mind, I decided to tackle a quick little weekend project. Maybe two weekends if things really got out of hand.

The idea seemed simple enough. Wash all the algae off the deck before it was time to start digging flower beds and planting the garden. How nice would it be to have the deck ready by the time the first real warm days arrived?

What I hadn’t counted on was the fact that absolutely everything left outdoors in southern Sweden eventually develops a green coating. It doesn’t just grow on the deck. It grows on the walls, the roof, the trees and even on things I wasn’t entirely convinced were capable of growing moss. I started exactly where I’d planned to start – with the floor. Once the decking boards were clean, the walls suddenly looked filthy. Once the walls were clean, the ceiling looked tired.

Two weekends later everything was finally clean. By then, even I should have realised that the original schedule no longer had any connection to reality.

At that point I was ready to call it finished. The algae were gone and, although the pressure washer had been a little too enthusiastic in a few places, everything was clean. That was good enough for me. Pär stood looking at the deck for a while before saying that if I didn’t paint it now, I’d spend the entire summer sitting there being annoyed by how it looked.

Unfortunately, he had a point.

Pär likes to claim that I’m the one who keeps coming up with new projects before we’ve finished the old ones. There’s probably some truth to that. The problem is that he very quickly starts thinking about how things really ought to be done. And once he’s done that, there’s rarely any going back to the simpler solution. I’d therefore like to document the following while we still agree on how it actually happened. It may come in handy the next time he claims the whole thing was my idea.

So we painted the ceiling and the posts. Once that was done, I started thinking that a white deck railing might actually look quite nice. Surely that couldn’t take very long.

So we dismantled the entire railing.

We quickly realised that the balusters were still perfectly usable, which meant that more than eighty of them needed to be sanded, primed, painted and then put back together with new posts and a new handrail. It wasn’t until then that we discovered that more than eighty balusters is actually quite a lot of balusters.

With the railing taken apart and the balusters spread all over the yard, I suddenly had plenty of time to think about the deck while sanding them.

My lemon trees, which I’d picked up for the bargain price of fifty kronor each during the autumn clearance sale, were supposed to get a permanent home out there too. The more I looked at the wall, the less convinced I became that the little window was big enough. We also happened to have a couple of old, larger window panes stored in the carport. Making the opening a bit bigger couldn’t possibly take more than half an hour.

Pär looked at the wall for a while, then at the windows, and then back at the wall again.

“But… if we’re doing this anyway, what if we made almost the entire wall glass?”

I wasn’t entirely convinced. It sounded like considerably more work than simply installing a bigger window.

It’s probably just as well that our nearest neighbours don’t have a clear view of this part of the property. A work skirt combined with the famous Skåne winds could easily have resulted in a few awkward conversations.

I was right that it would take considerably longer.

I have to admit that Pär was right about the result.

The glass wall turned out far better than the larger window I’d originally imagined, and it’s probably the feature I’m happiest with on the entire deck.

While the paint was drying, I also ran out of places to balance all those freshly painted balusters. That gave me plenty of time to start thinking about the wood-fired hot tub.

It too was covered in algae and, since we already had a perfectly good hot tub on the other side of the house, we weren’t even sure this one was worth spending any time on. It might not hold water. It might not heat up properly. Or it might simply turn out to be a very large flower pot.

After giving it a thorough scrub, we filled it with water and lit the fire for a test run. It held water, it got hot and, after adding a bit of extra insulation around the outside, it heated up much faster than we expected.

Neither Pär nor I have much experience with swimming pools, hot tubs or, in general, anything involving water that’s expected to stay in one place. Our combined qualifications consisted mainly of the fact that we’d both been swimming before. So off we went to Jula for a sand filter pump. A few new holes were drilled into the hot tub, followed by a fair amount of standing around trying to work out which hose was supposed to go where. I’m still not entirely convinced we’ve done it correctly, but the water circulates and nothing has leaked so far, which seems like a good enough reason to leave it alone.

With the new glass wall finished and the deck finally clean, we decided to install a gutter. I’d always wanted a rain chain. They look amazing, don’t they? A bit of Googling later I found an absolutely hideous one with little owls on it that I simply had to have.

I didn’t have a proper rain barrel, but an old bathtub seemed perfectly adequate for the time being.

What I hadn’t taken into account was the wind. That seems to be becoming a recurring theme. Rain is supposed to fall straight down. Here in Skåne it mostly seems to arrive horizontally. A regular downpipe would probably have worked much better, but it doesn’t have owls. If the flower bed gets watered at the same time, I’ll just call that an added bonus.

I ran into exactly the same problem with the decorative metal wind spinner. It turned out not to have been designed for Skåne’s winds either and now consists of considerably more pieces than when I bought it.

Around the same time I came across a Facebook Marketplace listing where someone was giving away twenty square metres of paving bricks. Needless to say, we hitched up the trailer. Loading and unloading them turned into a decent workout, but you don’t say no to twenty square metres of free paving bricks. They became the border between the gravel and the new flower bed beneath the deck.

The flower bed had actually been planned for months. Back in February I’d ordered bare-root roses, and by now they needed somewhere permanent to live.

I’m not quite finished yet, though. I still haven’t decided what I want to do with the last section beneath the deck. Knowing myself, I’ll probably change my mind a few more times before I finally make a decision.

Eventually, the deck actually started to feel finished. An old table that had been standing behind the house got a new lease of life with a bit of sanding and paint, the string lights finally went up, and I somehow managed to complete my original project of cleaning a little algae and moss off the deck.

The best part of the whole outdoor space is that we actually use it. The wood-fired hot tub, which we weren’t even sure worked, has spent far more hours serving as a refreshing plunge pool than as a hot tub this summer, and the lemon trees seem perfectly happy behind the glass wall. I’m already looking forward to next year, when the roses have filled out a bit, the clematis has hopefully started climbing and the flower bed looks a little less like it was planted yesterday.

As for me…

I’m still convinced the next project will only take one or two weekends.