This past weekend we were lucky enough to have some great weather so we took the opportunity to get our deck prepared for the upcoming sunny months.

We had never stained a deck before, but it was surprisingly easy. Here are the easy steps for getting a deck stained in a weekend.

BEFORE:

STEP 1: Use a wood cleaner and scrub your deck. Our deck was new so, we didn’t need to stain down old stain. Our deck was built in Oct and it had a couple of months to get weathered, which is what is recommended. Still all wood contains some residue from the mill, which is why you need to use the wood cleaner.

*We tested out the stain on some spare pieces of deck wood that had been left outside without getting cleaned and the stain never set into the wood. Don’t skip this step.

Let dry overnight.

STEP 2: All wood has some imperfections and at times pieces of wood have stamps on them from the mill. In order to remove all that it’s good to go around and use a hand sander to make any corrections needed.

STEP 3: Prepare your house for stain application. We used kraft paper that we slide in between the deck and the house.

Lift paper up to cover the wall and tape to sliding:

STEP 4: Apply stain. There are a lot of different ways you can tackle this like using a paint brush, a staining pad, a roller or a paint sprayer. Originally we were going to go with the staining pad technique, but Jon got to Home Depothe found a Wagner Power Stainer/Sprayeron sale and decided to pick it up. The lovely folks at Home Depot recommended it for stain application and we figured we could use it for other projects.

STEP 5: After applying the stain we had to smooth the stain out with a paintbrush. This technique has to also be done if you go with a stain pad or roller.

Our little helper got into the action:

Here is the deck after the first coat:

STEP 6: Let the first coat dry for 1-2 hours and then you can apply the 2nd coat. We wanted to ensure that we got the stain into all of the nooks, which meant doing the 2nd coat with just the paintbrush in order to do a heavier coat.

STEP 7: Let stain cure for 36 hours.

AFTER:

CLOSE UP:

We used a semi-transparent stain by Behr and went with Cordovan Brownfor the color. It’s a nice dark stain, but still allows the wood grain to show through. Also the semi-stain has a protective finish on it, which means once you are done applying the stain no need to add any other coats on top of it.

All in all the whole project took a weekend simply because we needed to apply the deck to fully dry after using the wood cleaner. Over all actual labor was between 5-6 hours.

Now to the fun part! What oh what are we going to put on it. We have already picked out items for the dining area, but are still on the look out for a comfy sectional that won’t break the bank. Not an easy feat!!