One Room Challenge: Building a Pergola, Refinishing the Deck and Solar String Lights

Ever have one of those weeks where you don’t feel like you’ve accomplished all that much, but when you look back, you can see just how much you’ve moved the needle? That was this week for us. It’s week six of the One Room Challenge, and with just two weeks left to go, I’m feeling the pressure. We still have a couple of big projects to go (our mini outdoor kitchen and built-in bench) but looking at everything we’ve done so far; the space is already completely transformed.

The first thing I took on this week was sanding and staining the deck. I rented a belt sander for the first time, and it was a workout maneuvering it around the deck. They have a lot of power and want to launch themselves forward, so it felt like I was wresting the sander the entire time. On the upside, it worked fast, and I got the job done in just a couple of hours. The stain we went with resulted from a color match gone wrong, but I’m glad that we ended up keeping it after living with the finish for a week. Had we gone with the darker shade, the deck would have been too hot for the kids to run around on barefoot, and it would show so much dirt. The gray-blue finish we ended up with feels just right with the contrast of the rugs and pieces around it.

The other major project we tackled was to build out the Toja grid pergola! You order a “kit” with all the hardware needed to assemble a pergola and purchase your one wood. The most challenging part was sourcing the right sizes of cedar locally, but once the wood was sourced and cut to size, assembly was pretty straightforward. The frame itself we could have had up in an hour easily, but we went with a version with slats so I can grow my climbing rose over the structure, and those took a little encouragement with a rubber mallet to fit the pieces together.

Finally, we hung the solar string lights we ordered from Brightech, which I assumed would be fast and easy but ended up taking much longer than expected and probably caused the most arguments of any project this year. We used this hardware hanging kit from Amazon (which I recommend) and bracketed a cutoff from building the pergola to the frame of our fence. After a lot of mismeasurement (be warned that the advertised length of the lights includes a long bulb-less stretch of the cord at the end and cannot be connected), we pulled everything down. We started over, reducing it to two strands, each spanning from a corner of the house to the middle of the fence, as clean and simple as possible. I had read a lot online about solar lights not being bright enough, but these light up the space beautifully and were well worth the trouble at the end of the day. Check back next week for another update, and if you want to see it unfold in (mostly) real-time, follow me on Instagram.

Thanks for following along; you can check out what the rest of the participants are up to over on the One Room Challenge blog

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