The Big Deck Project

A few weeks ago my dad tore down the old roof to his backyard deck with a plan to cut new rafters and redo everything. Well, my parents are very interested in the Caribbean since they took a trip to the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic many years ago, and they thought an ocean theme would be great in the backyard. I made the mistake of mentioning how great it would be to paint the rafters in an under the sea theme with all kinds of tropical and ocean fish and sea shells etc. My mother's exact response to my suggestion was "that's a great idea, why don't you do that". So it was decided that I would paint the rafters and I was told that I had 1 week to paint them all so that my dad could put the roof back up over the next weekend. Suffice it to say I spent the next 5 days painting morning til night. I couldn't wait to see the end of painting all those fish, imagine my chagrin on day 3 when I realized that I had to paint both sides.
Luckily, my parents decided that 3 of the rafters could be painted to look like sand and we could put dried starfish and sand dollars on it along with some sea shells to break up the monotony of all the fish and add some interesting 3 dimensional elements. I was quite relieved because until that moment I hadn't been sure that I could complete this project in just 5 days. With this change I was able to finish by the weekend, but..........
......... let's fast forward about 3 weeks and the roof is finally going up today. We still have to order the starfish and sand dollars that will go on all the sand painted boards, but the rest of them are complete and have been put back in place above the deck.

I will post some pics when it is all done so you can see the finished project. They are going to totally repaint the deck and add a Palm Beach Ceiling fan in the center over the table and chairs.

I couldn't help but mention how nice it would be if they had a painted Mural on the side of the house so that it looked like they were on the land end of a long dock stretching out over the blue greens of the ocean with a sunset on the horizon...................I need to be careful what I say or I could spend my whole summer painting the house:)