The Deck & Porch are Done!

I am once again sitting here at McDonald's, sipping my soda, and I have some finishes to report, but not of the quilting kind. I sealed the back deck on Saturday and finished the front porch today. I used Thompson’s water seal in Honey Gold. We are really pleased with how they turned out.

Here is the before picture of the deck:

And here is the after:

After cutting cedar on Friday and doing the deck on Saturday, I could barely move on Saturday night, so I told DH he could forget about me getting the porch done during this trip given that it is a third bigger than the deck.

Well, I woke up feeling pretty good on Sunday morning, so I figured if I got started early, I could get quite a bit done before it got hot. While working on the deck I finally got smart about half way through and realized that if I did two boards at a time, I would only have to move back and forth half as many times. Duh. So, using that approach on the porch, I was able to get about two thirds of the porch done in the same time it had taken me to do the back. I was out of sealer at that point, so had to stop anyway. I picked up another gallon later that day and finished up the porch this morning.  I am so glad to have that project done!

Here is the finished porch.  I took this picture right after finishing, so the wet looking spot in the upper part of the picture is where it is still drying.

And here is a combo before/after shot when the porch was partially done so you can see what a difference the sealer made.

We went back to the ranch yesterday and spent about 6 hours clearing more cedar. This time our only visitor was a cottontail bunny. I think that ends the manual labor for this vacation. We still have some things to do around the house, but nothing as labor intense as the other projects we’ve done.

Since it was early morning when we drove out, I had the camera ready in case we saw any animals. I got a pretty good picture of some white tail bucks that are currently in velvet and growing their antlers. They were on our neighbor’s property (not the one we've been visiting with), which is part of the ranch, but which he was allowed to enclose with an internal fence. Don’t even get me going on that topic because we were told internal fencing was not allowed, but money talks and those of us without the big bucks just have to suck it up and deal with it. Anyway, here are the deer. Zoom in to see them better.



The big surprise was when we came upon a few aoudad sheep grazing right along the road. They are extremely skittish, so they took off about the time I got the camera on them. I didn’t even have time to hit the zoom, so this picture is not very good, but hopefully you can see the aoudad on the left. If you zoom in , it’s the brown spot with horns. Both the male and female of this species have horns. This is the only picture of I’ve gotten of an aoudad at the ranch so it will have to do.



Here’s a picture of an Auodad from the internet so you can see what they actually look like. We got to see baby aoudads one year and they were like goats on steroids.  So cute!

Oh, and we did see the donkeys again when we did a quick drive of the main road. We haven’t seen the llamas again, which is a bummer as we only got a good look at the one. We would have liked to get a closer look at the other two as well.