02/23/2020
The stain on the playhouse decking is finished now and I thought I'd give a few tips on staining or re-staining treated wood. The main purpose of stains are to impart some color (obviously) and more importantly to slow down the weathering of the treated wood. While more resistant to rot and insect infestation, treated wood will loose it's nice finish quality quickly if not protected. Treated wood (usually a species of pine) is low density. It sucks up water, expands, then dries again. This wetting cycle creates small cracks that let in more water and the problem gets exacerbated over many cycles. Combine that with UV damage and your brand new deck can go downhill pretty quickly. However, you may have heard that it is not good to stain a deck immediately after installation and this is correct (most of the time). New treated wood is still considered "wet" from the chemical treatment and needs to dry out first to properly soak up the stain into the wood fibers. I purchased kiln dried wood (there is an added cost) for my project. It is oven dried and can be stained immediately. For the most protection you can use a solid stain which are typically just a paint designed for treated wood. The trade off is that you hide a lot of the wood grain and when it starts to degrade it will often peel (see second picture for an example I found this past weekend). Another popular option are semi-transparent stains which have less pigment but in turn offer less protection and have to be reapplied every year or two. The option I went with was a semi-solid. The added pigments help protect better but you can still see the wood grain and *usually* will not have peeling issues because it's basically just a semi-transparent with more pigment added (the oil based I have used multiple times over the years has worked great). If you can, it is best to sand a little to get to fresh new wood grain right before stain application. A belt or orbital sander usually works great for this. Let me know if you have any additional questions! .
@ Montreal, Quebec
