Bridge over troubling water

[JimCrossley 14]

Just thought I would share how we approached an interesting wood project. The pictures are of a bridge connecting a visitor’s parking lot to a condo in Atlanta. We finished stripping and staining a bridge over a small stream a while ago but I have been a little busy lately so I didn’t get a chance to post this earlier. We used HD80 for stripping off some DIY junk and Ready Seal for the stain; medium brown. Except for a three hour period during the staining of the floor, we kept the bridge open for traffic. We started the project before Christmas and we had a lot of UPS and FedEx deliveries to contend with.

The major concern for us was not contaminating the stream with junk or stain.

We place a large piece of plastic under the bridge on the right hand side and finished all of the handrails on that side. We sprayed form the outside to the inside and hand brushed the entire inside railings so as not to spray out beyond our plastic drop cloth below. Then we moved the plastic drop cloth and repeated the process for the left hand side. Just in case there was any overspray which was not caught by our tarp under the bridge, we placed an oil catch boom down stream about 20 yards.

I won’t bore you with the after pictures, it turned out great. I wanted this post to be all about how to approach a problem over water. Over all looking back, it was a fun project to have completed and the Board of Directors for the condo association was very happy.

[JimCrossley 14]

Here are the other two pictures.

[Beth n Rod 1,279]

Thanks for posting this Jim.

It looks like a challenging job in respect to the environmental precautions you took while working on this project.

Rod!~

[JFife 14]

Please "bore" us with the afters!!! Nice job indeed,

[JimCrossley 14]

Jon,

The after pictures were taken on a cloudy day and did not turn out very well. I am going back to take a couple of pictures later this week when the sun decides to come back out.

[John Orr 206]

Jim,

Looks great. I was wondering if you took precautions to keep the "slurry" of chem/old stain out of the creek?

[JimCrossley 14]

John, we captured on the bank the run off as it came off the plastic. I think we spent more time positioning the plastic than we need to but we don't do this kind of project very often, which is a good thing. To our surprise there was not a whole lot of junk as it had been some number of years since the bridge was stained. I had most of the spindels over the water sanded by hand by some cheap labor I found hanging out at Home Depot.

[PressurePros 248]

Very nice job, Jim. Kudos for doing the right thing and being enviroment concious.

[Chappy 138]

how did you get the outside?

[JimCrossley 14]

Jon, we over water we leaned over and sprayed. Over land, we used a ladder or reached over and did what we could by hand so we did not have to cover the plants.

[JimCrossley 14]

Here is a picture of the oil catch boom after the project was completed. It was new when we started and all of the stain we captured is on the boom.

[JimCrossley 14]

Jon, I went back last week and took some pictures in the sun as the finished project. Here you go.

[James 624]

Nice project Jim.

[JimCrossley 14]

Thanks James. It was a challenge. Just like Tiger had this weekend.:golf: