After Blue Skies, Alix came back to Elora to spend a week with us. I also took the week off, and together our main project was to re-stain the decks around the house. It turned out that we had just enough good weather to get the job done, so the timing really worked out.

Mum was kind enough to lend me her power washer, so on Tuesday we got right to work cleaning off the decks. Of course, we were so focused on getting the work done, that we forgot to take photos of the deck before we washed it. However, just as we were opening up the cans of stain on the back deck, we remembered to take some photos. If you hover your mouse over the image below, you can see the difference between the deck after it was power washed, and after it was stained again.

We tried really hard to match up the stain with the colour of the house, and the colour that the deck was stained before. It was quite a challenge, since they were slightly different colours, and since Canadian Tire messed up the base, but we managed to get an almost exact colour match just by eyeballing it and guessing how many pumps of which colour tints to add. It only took us three trips to the store to get it right!

Technical details: These photos are panoramas of pictures were taken with my 5D Mark II + EF 17-40 L at 20mm (17mm for the "before" photo), ISO 100, f/9 (f/8 for the "before" photo), for 1/25th of a second. I was trying to match the exposure exactly from day to day, but clearly I wasn't paying close enough attention to what I was doing, because I managed to screw up the focal length and the aperture for the "after" shots. That made it really hard to make the panoramas match up exactly, and is the reason why there is a big black area at the top of the "after" picture.