How to Properly Maintain a Wood Fence for Lifetime Durability | Expert Stain and Seal Tips

Hey, this is Chrissy Idaho Painter. Hopefully you enjoy this free video lesson on fences and decks. This is part of my comprehensive course over at paintlifeupply.com. The whole course goes into marketing. It goes into estimating. It goes into how to professionally stain fences, decks, and percolas. So hopefully you enjoy this lesson and thank you very much for watching. All right. Today I'm going to be talking about doing maintenance coats on fences. So we got a fence here. This fence has been done two years ago with expert stain and seal. And I'll talk a little bit about their product. Their product is an oil-based product. It's a penetrating, self-leveling oil. And one of the benefits to their product, it's an oil, so it adds something to the wood. Keeps it from splitting and cracking. Cuz typically your wood, it's it's a tree. It's been cut down. It's sitting out here. Whether it's a fence, whether it's a deck, it's just continuing to dry over time. All the tannins, all the oils are just drying out of it. Eventually, it begins to twist, split, and crack. And that's kind of just the nature, you know, of wood. Now, adding oil to the wood, it stops that process. It keeps the wood soft. It keeps it um protected from the sun. So, expert stain and seal oil is a great product to have a fence last for years and years and years and look amazing every, you know, 2 to 3 years. If it's a semi-transparent, transparent, or semi-olid, it's going to have to be coated, you know, every two to three years. And the coating process is typic is typically uh just the same as the first time you did it. You'll typically come out, strip a fence, uh get it down to bare wood, and then you'll apply your coat. You're going to spray it on. You're going to back brush it. It's very labor intensive. The next time you come back to maintenance coat it, you got to spray it. You got to back brush it. It's labor intensive. Now, expert stainless steel oil, you do not have to backbrush it at all. It's a self-leveling oil. And what that means is you can spray with a random powder all all over. You can get drips. You can get runs. It's going to self-level. It's going to penetrate into the wood without back brushing at all. And so what that does actually mean for future coats, maintenance coats, it's very fast, simple, and easy to do. If you apply maintenance coats when you're supposed to, this fence will continue to look amazing years down the road. The maintenance coat, I just come out here. I don't have to do any prep work. You could come out, do a light wash. You're just maintenance coating it, and you're done it in the proper amount of time. You don't have to strip the wood. Typically, a fence uh that's been out for years, we typically have to strip a lot of the wood off, the discoloring off to get it so it looks good. This fence was brand new wood. It was treated with expert stain and seal oil. It was run through the expert stainless steel machine, absolutely saturated it. Now, we're back for just the maintenance coat. And it depends on the climate, too. It could be 1 to two years, but two to three. You should never let a fence treated with an oilbased product to go more than 3 years in in any climate because what happens is the sun, water, snow, everything just leeches those oils out. They dry out over time. The first time you coat it, uh so much of it, it penetrates deep deep into the wood. So, your first time you maintenance coat it, uh it's a it's very important to um get a good coat on it once again. So, a maintenance coat typically is going to take less product than the first time you coat it where you're just absolutely saturating it. We're just going to be loading up a sprayer, an airless sprayer. I'm going have the pressure down really low to control over spray. I'm going to have a small tip on it and begin spraying. And once again, their product, one of the unique things about their product is you do not have to backbrush it. And I kind of want to stress that point because if you're using a water-based product, um, solid color stains, most oilbased products, they aren't self-leveling. And if you don't backbrush them, the fence or deck is going to look really, really bad. Especially fences. You'll see fences, you've probably seen some driving down the road. It looks um, you know, dry, looks wy, it has lap marks, it has overlap marks, and it just looks kind of like a mess. whether a professional has done it or not, that's a fence that's been sprayed with a product that is a not self-leveling or penetrating product and it hasn't been back rushed and it hasn't been coated with enough enough product. So, whenever I'm working with oil based products, doing fences, I always wear we call a monkey suit, Tyveck suit. I'll wear a respirator. Uh, anytime I'm spraying oilbased products, I typically wear a respirator with um, vapor organic vapor uh, mask on them. Uh, activated charcoal filters on it. I don't use just a P95 or N95 filter on there, which I typically would if I'm just spraying the exterior. You got to stir your product up. Um, the product's sitting for a while, the tent settles really, really fast. You definitely want to use a stir stick to scrape up because it'll settle down to the bottom and get pretty hard. use a stir stick to scrape everything off the bottom and get it um broken free. Then I'll just take a drill and I put a stir whip. I like using just a hide stir whip to begin um stirring that tent in there. Get it mixed in really really well. If you're doing a large fence, um a huge subdivision or something like that, definitely want to like stir it occasionally cuz this tent does settle pretty fast. We got a short fence. I'm not going to have to worry about it here, but the tint will settle and you'll begin drawing the tint that's settling off the bottom. And then by the time you get to the end of a five, the color could be different. It could be lighter. You've sucked up a lot of the tint that's been settling while you're spraying. I always wear gloves whenever I'm using expert stain and seal oil products. I typically wear gloves and I use Raven gloves. I put underneath these gloves right here that way cuz uh the oils actually could seep right through these gloves. But I like using these for grip. You can see I already got oil on my hands. I just don't want that getting on my hands. And I'll get in my suit, my protective suit, cuz I don't want to get any oil on me cuz it doesn't wash out of your clothes. Well, neither does paint for that matter. But so I'm getting ready to spray here and I'm just see I'm wrapping some tape around my suit. I don't like the suits how puffy and baggy they are. I buy um extremely large suits so I can just not have to take my shoes off. I can slip right into them easily. But then they're really baggy. So wrap tape around it tightens it up and now it's not going to be touching things getting in the way of things. So just kind of simple little tip. I just use an orange frog tape just to wrap the suit up. Now this is an important you know step of the process actually stirring up your product. This could be you can easily forget to do this and this could cause a whole lot of problems if you just stick your uh product down in here and begin uh drawing um stain out staying in the fence. All that stuff settled on the bottom is going to be sucking right into your sprayer and it's going to be this fence is going to be really dark in the beginning and then really light at the end of the five. So make sure and I'm going to show you get my stir stick. I can feel a lot of tint down there. So I'm going to scrape it off. I'm going to show you. This is all the tent settled on the bottom. Now, this would become Whoa. A big problem, you know, if you didn't stir that up. So, there you go. Look at all that tent. So, I'm going to break all this stuff free and then begin stirring it mechanically. So, the reason I mean, you could ask, well, why aren't you just using the whip to do that? The whip actually, it's not a flat surface, so it doesn't scrape it off the bottom. All right. So, we've got, you know, I've got a five that's, you know, about 3/4 full. This fence, the portions we're doing, the sections, I'm not going to go through a five. I'll go through probably maybe 2 and 1/2 gallons or so. If you were going to go through multiple fives, it's a good idea to box them. So, I got two fives that are the same color. This was the original that was used on the fence when it was originally coated with the expert stain machine. This is a new five. You'll want to box them and mix them together. So, I'm getting my my sprayer set up. I typically use a 30-in extension so I'm not next to the fence when spraying so I'm not just getting clobbered, you know, with overspray or oil. I always use um just old tips. I don't use any new tips when I'm spraying a fence. You're not after like a fine finish or you're not worried about um especially with expert stain and seal products. You're not worrying about fingering and all that stuff cuz it self-levels. But I always use an HA tip. Gives you nice feathered edges. This is a 517. I'll spray it with a 517 HA cuz I can kick the pressure way down. I don't want a lot of pressure because I want to control overspray. This isn't about I don't I'm not concerned about going, you know, super fast. What I'm concerned about is overspray carrying, you know, for 100 yards down the road. It's about 800 PSI. So that's down about right where I want it. So now you can see I can get a run like that. Don't have to worry about it. It's going to penetrate, self-level. Any other product, all the other products I've always used in the past, that would be a big problem if you didn't back brush it out. That would um dry just like that. I'm going to get my mask on, ready to go. [Music] Heat. Heat. see in this video, you know, I'm see I'm just spraying at a downward angle to get the tops of this horizontal privacy fence. If I just sprayed straight, I wouldn't necessarily be getting the tops. It is a penetrating oil, so it's going to penetrate through the whole wood. But the angle adapter makes it nice on the opposite side. When I get on the other side of the fence, I don't have to worry about spraying tops and bottoms, just the face. So, you can see the I can take angle it up. Now I can spray the bottom. Get that sprayed too. Once again, you can see I don't have to worry about runs, lap marks, anything, spraying it, you know, inside back inside there. Um, all these boards were actually uh pre-stained, all the 2x4s. So, even behind here, it was stained before. But if I want to make sure I'm getting it inside, just spray it just like that. I can shoot it down inside there. Just like that. it by hitting the tops and the bottoms. I almost don't even have to go over the face again cuz I've already hit the face by just hitting the tops and bottoms. A little discoloration um from the pine trees right here. Even if I spray over that, that'll wash right off a week from now. [Music] I dream. [Music] All right. Now, I got this section of the fence sprayed. I think I've gone through a gallon. So, that's a maintenance coat. Both sides, you know, one gallon. I think it took me 15 minutes to spray it. This is super fast. Doing maintenance coats is fast and easy. And it's really important to do if you want the fence to look like this, you know, 10 years down the road. Now, once again, this is also going to help ward off bugs and stuff um boring into the wood, chewing the wood up and stuff. Once again, it's also going to help it from twisting and cracking. So, this horizontal fence, I think there's only one picket. I saw the other side that was a little bit twisted and stuff. So, the um cardboard shield holder, I did break out the cardboard shield holder is dead calm. No wind. So typically if I got a lot of wind and I'm like concerned about this metal structure is just uh an old um container steel container we're not worried about. But if I was worried about you know wind picking it up carrying it towards that direction I'd be using my cardboard shield holder especially when I go over the tops or when I go you know down on the bottom. This isn't somebody's lawn. This is up in the mountains. This is all going to be the these uh weeds will be you know mowed and stuff over but the product itself foodgrade oil uh uh environmental friendly product. It's non non-toxic. It's not going to harm you know plants. It's not going to harm anything if you get any you know on the plants at all. But there we go. We're going to move on to the next section and do our maintenance coat on the next um horizontal privacy section down the way here. Heat. Hey. Hey. Hey. [Music] So just to give you an idea. So I mean this fence is already stained now completely saturated. And you know just to give you an idea of the self-leveling you know properties to this product. If you went and just sprayed some stain like that, you know, with another oilbased product or water-based product, that's going to stay like that, solid color like that, and you're going to actually see that. Now, we'll revisit this in just a little bit, and that's going to be completely gone. So, you can see we're like about 3 minutes in. You know, we're back here. Uh you probably couldn't even tell unless I pointed it out, but this is where I actually sprayed it and it's beginning. It's already self-leveled itself. So, it's dispersing itself, you know, sideways. It's actually working itself up. It's penetrating in. So, it's very forgiving for anybody that doesn't have experience, you know, spraying. And it's one of the things it's not as labor intensive as most products out there. Like, I don't I don't have any experience with any product ever in my past that you didn't have to back brush. So, now one person can spray a fence and be done. You don't have to have a second person. You don't h you don't have to stop and backbrush. Easy, simple to use, very forgiving product. [Music]