Staining a Deck | What You Need To Know

[Music] right today I'm out here uh getting ready to stain a deck we're going to be staining with an oilbased product from stain and seal experts I'm going to be staying in it natural this is a brand new redwood deck recently installed by the customer and I'm getting it ready we're going to walk you through some of the process to you know properly stain a deck like this to make it look amazing and make it last now the first thing I'm doing you're going to see me I got my 3x4 and my 5 in sander it's very important to sand the wood first first with an 80 grit sandpaper that way you open up the wood so it will accept more stain you want the wood to accept as much stain so it'll penetrate deeply into the wood brand new uh wood typically when it's m it's really smooth has like a mill glaze on on top of it and it doesn't accept uh stain as well if you if you don't sand it so you want to sand it with an 80 grit sandpaper you're going to see me sanding with my 3x4 sander the small areas I'll be hitting the larger areas with my 5 in sander and once again use an 0 grit I'm using a Clos cell uh 10 mm sponge and also um and going be using uh Echo silk and um going to be using Echo storm to sand this with you don't have to like over sand I am sanding like some of the corners and edges to have them nice smooth um edges and stuff too so I'm sanding some of this to um just give it a better look and a better feel but the uh the main sanding you're doing is just quickly going over it to you basically rough it up and open it up so it doesn't have a smooth surface so it actually accept more stain now I am using an oil-based penetrating St stain on this from uh stain and seal experts I'm going to be using a natural color cuz the customer wants it to look like um Redwood doesn't want a lot of color to it you do have to have color in your stain you can't just put a clear on if you want it to be protected um from UV rays and um sunlight so um if you don't want it to discolor over time you definitely want uh a stain that has um uh pigment in it to give it some protection I am using a penetrating non-drying oil product so it's going to penetrate into the wood it's going to add something to the wood keeps the wood from cracking SPL splitting and checking over time so um I'm saying it at one thing this is a brand new deck so you definitely want to test for moisture make sure uh it's not you know too wet so sometimes the wood will come out it's not kill and dry it's extremely wet if it's wet it won't accept stain this is a small deck so I'm not going to be spraying I don't want um to any overspray oil or anything I'm just going to be hand brushing this uh brushing it's important to get good penetration if you were to spray you would want to um spray and back brush to get better penetration but I'm going to be just BR really small I just got to do a little bit of masking around with some frog tapes I don't get it on the house but um other that we're good to go I'm going to show you the sanding we're going to sand it then I'm going to dust it off blow it off and then we're going to begin applying the stain so here we go I'll talk a little bit we got some you know um lag bolts and stuff right there you can just stain right over that if you do have large hardware and stuff like on a gate or anything um one of the great things about uh stain and SE it is a non-drying oil so you could spray or brush stain right over the hardware and then later on just wipe it right off it'll wipe right off with like a crocodile cloth so you don't have to worry about getting it on the hard where you don't have to worry about masking it off [Music] either you there's different types of oils you can you know stain a deck with um or even water-based products too so water-based products aren't adding you know anything to the wood to you know increase the life of the wood keep it from splitting checking um drying out uh penetrating oils penetrate you know into the wood add something to it keep the wood fibers you know soft keep them from drying out keep well keep the deck from splitting and cracking you know over time so it's really important to use like a penetrating oil stain and seal experts penetrating oil never dries and it'll literally just keep penetrating over time all the way through it'll literally penetrate through the other side of the deck even though the other side of the deck you know isn't done one of the um things when building a deck like this if you have the opportunity stain seal experts has a machine you can actually run all your wood through it stay both sides um all four um edges and then you can apply it you know right after you stain it but um not everybody has the ability to do that so show you now I'm just going to take um dust this deck so I'm applying the stain want to apply nice heavy coat that it's going to penetrate in the wood you're going to want to really saturate it uh and then it's going to penetrate pretty quick any excess if there's any excess cooled on the wood you're going to want to wipe the excess off and you actually walk on it you as soon as it's soaked in so I'm just using a small smaller cut in type brush to work up against the house it's taking my time to want to Splatter or [Music] d [Music] so you can see I'm allowing it to penetrate then I'm wiping it off any excess so I just got to say this is really important because um this happened to me in the past and it was a big mistake not wiping off the excess a customer called me a month later their deck was really tacky and was collecting dust and dirt if you don't wipe off the excess it'll never dry and it'll stay tacky forever collecting dirt um showing Footprints and everything so it's absolutely critical that you wipe off the excess stain of any oilbased stain you're Us in so water-based stains you don't have that problem but oilbased stains you know you do have that issue so whatever you do make sure you wipe off the stain and tell you another um handy tip that cuz you know a lot of the tips I give are from life's experiences and I uh went to lunch put all our rags in a bucket next to the deck and spontaneous combustion a hot summer day the rags caught on fire burn burned the grass almost caught the deck on fire luckily it did it but um that was my experience with spontaneous combustion and balling Rags up and putting them in a bucket one of the really cool things about stain and seal and one of the reasons why I really didn't like using oilbased products is because the inherent dangers of fires and um stain and seal does not have that problem because the oil that they used uh for their products has a flash point I believe it's like 500° versus um all other oils have a flash point of like I believe it's like 90° and so they'll spontaneously combust stain and seal experts products it will not combust in your vehicle um the flash point is so high it's literally almost impossible for it to catch on fire so one of the benefits one of the things I like about stain and seals [Music] products [Music] a [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh