No, it did not take us two months to finish the pergola. The summer has absolutely flown by! Between the usual summer craziness and a packed calendar of events at work there was just no time for blogging.
So with no further ado, here is the update and reveal of project: pergola.
We started off the day with, you guessed it, more sanding and painting. Hurray!
Important public service announcement: do not EVER try to paint lattice with a brush. I seriously wasted 4 hours of my life on day one trying to get into every nook and cranny with a paint brush. And the end result looked terrible! The stain inevitably dripped through to the other side and created big dark globs. It was so awful in fact that we didn't even use that piece of lattice.
So I wised up and called several places to find out how much they charge to rent a paint sprayer. While at Home Depot (our fifth trip, mind you) the man at the rental center convinced me that the commercial paint sprayers (3000 psi) that they rent would be a bit overkill for our project. He advised that I buy a cheap sprayer in the paint section. So I picked up a Wagner (1700 psi) for $68 - which was just slightly more than it would have cost to rent one. Score!
Hour 12,867 of staining.
Then it was time to put all the pieces together, and
voilà! Ain't it purdy?
And it's even better now that we have some hanging plants and lights. We love having candlelight dinners outside (as long as the pesky mosquitoes don't drop in for a visit).
It ended up costing us slightly more than we had hoped, but it was still only 1/3 the cost of hiring someone to build it for us. Can't beat that!
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