How to Stain a Deck the Easy Way (Best Tools to Refinish)

I'm Brad and today we're gonna be cleaning and standing a deck using the right tools to make it easy So here's the deck that we're working with. It has a lot of wear on it and it has a lot of stains like this and that and this and that the first thing that we want to do is get rid of everything off the porch so we can see what we're working with and give it a good cleaning my wife Susan and I moved everything off the deck and either out into the yard or into the house and making concrete top outdoor furniture sounds great in theory until you have to move it but when we got all of it moved we could really see how bad the deck looked now thankfully the boards were in good shape they needed a serious cleaning and some new sting I started by removing all the loose debris with a broom and I switched over to the shop vac to get the leaves and dirt that are wedged between the boards and against the house this is also a great time to vacuum off your window sills and screens while you're at it here and you'll want to remove anything that's touching the wood part of the deck like plant hangers or wind chimes and if you have a covered deck like we do go ahead and remove the downspouts if they're attached to the posts because you don't want to get any stain on those all right now we're gonna start cleaning the deck and I'm gonna be using two solutions here the first one is just a general degreaser I mean applying both of them with a pressure washer but this one's going to help get off the grime and the stains and loosen that up and then this one is a specific wood deck pressure wash that has oxalic acid in it that's gonna help brighten up the wood I'll put it on and I'll tell you more about it as I'm doing it now the first tool that's going to make this job easier is a pressure washer I'm using a gas powered model actually to but more on that later but pressure washers have different tips and the black tip is typically the low pressure tip I put that one on the sprayer and then I went down the entire deck including the railings and the posts now the wood is old and dry and if you apply cleaner directly to the dry boards it's gonna soak it in quickly and it can cause streaking if it fully dries so giving everything a good spray out of water before degreasing is gonna help those boards from drying out while the cleaner is sitting and soaking I'm using the machine siphon tube to spread the cleaner it mixes the water with a degreaser in a ten to one ratio so I just put the pickup tube in the jug and then let it dilute it for and the instructions say to leave it on for ten minutes and then wash it off so I sprayed the deck down and while I was waiting I hit the stains in the grease spots with a deck brush to help loosen them up the stairs don't get much Sun and they had a ton of mildew on them so I scrubbed them real good as well and then I took the siphon tube out of the bottle and I put it into a bucket of some clean water and then switched the black tip out to the green 25 degree high-pressure tip to wash off the degreaser this tip is a good mix between high pressure but not being too strong to damage the deck so I went over the whole deck spraying off the grime and the dirt with this tip I did keep the nozzle pretty far away from the deck to make sure I wasn't damaging the wood and I went through in sweeping patterns removing all the cleaner it really did a great job with the mildew on the stairs but I realized this new pressure washer I was using wasn't the best one for me right now one thing I want to know you are gonna see me switching up the power washer so if you wonder what you saw one and then you see the other I started off with this at the wall 3400 psi way too aggressive that's why I was holding it so far back because I didn't want to damage the wood so I tried to tune it down and it just wasn't really working out for me so I'm gonna be using this Briggs & Stratton for the rest of it and I'm able to adjust the pressure a lot lower just be careful when you're working with pressure washer it will rip up your wood if you're not careful even when you can tune it down after I switched over I felt a lot more comfortable about being able to control the pressure and not tear up the wood now for cleaning a deck you really don't need a gas-powered model like this most electric ones are gonna have plenty of power to get the job done when I was spraying the columns I made sure not to spray upwards at the top you don't want to force any water behind the ceiling trim and have it mold up there I was also getting a lot better cleaning now with this tuned-in power washer because I wasn't afraid of tearing the wood up now you could see the difference here it is pretty crazy I just wasn't getting close enough before but now that I was it was really doing its job I finished up removing all the degreaser and then I could move on to the next step now that we got the deck cleaned up really well I'm gonna go apply that second chemical the oxalic acid the Zep deck cleaner that's gonna help brighten the wood and remove some of that extra stain and mildew that might have been left over and it's gonna help prepare for stain it's an extra step but I think it's really gonna make the end product better I swear back to the black tip and I used the siphon tube to put the deck spray on so we could sit for 5 to 10 minutes now the oxalic acid works kind of like a bleach and it brightens up the look of the gray weathered wood and it works much better when the dirt and grime are already gone so going with a degreaser first really let's the oxalic acid do its job more effectively so after sitting for 5 to 10 minutes I came back again with that green 25 degree tip and I washed it off just like before I wouldn't work real quick about safety when you're running a pressure washer things can be flying everywhere so a few things to keep in mind some safety glasses come on KC debris comes back up in your face you also want to wear some closed toed shoes boots are gray and long pants you don't want that beam to hit you in the leg or the foot it could really do some damage and also you want to have some hearing protection because the motor is loud and the water as it comes out of the high-pressure is very loud I use these I so tunes extras they are bluetooth so I can listen to music while I'm doing things I actually have a great coat for you too if you use code ft bTW link down below in the description you can get 10 bucks off of this exact pair stay safe out there alright we've let the deck dry for two days and now you can see it's nice and bright but I do have some stains here I don't know when these are from but anyway they didn't come up so what I'm gonna do is hit them with a sander I've also got some nails that are sticking up so we're gonna take care of those as well before we get ready to do the final stain an orbital sander is another great tool to make your deck refinish a bit easier a hand sanding off stains like this would take a long time but an orbital sander takes them up in just a few seconds now feathering the parts that you're sanding is also going to help with that final color to look more natural so it doesn't have harsh light too dark spots where you've gone directly down to bare wood and have something dark right next to it and after that I went over the whole deck looking for nails sticking up and I drove them flush or below the surface so that they wouldn't catch the stain pad an easy way to find these is to run your hammer over the surface and see where it catches then you can use a nail set or a punch to set them below the surface before jumping into the staining we taped up some plastic sheathing to protect the house because we are going to be doing some spraying soon for the finish I went with a bare semi-transparent stain and sealer in chocolate that's chocolate that's chocolate yummy now you typically want to go on the darker side when restaining so that you can help cover any of the old coloring that's left over the posts are going to be easiest to stain just using a brush so you don't have to worry about any overspray getting up on that ceiling I went ahead and got the top of the rails while I was edit so I wouldn't have to spray straight down either but for the rest of the railings and especially the spindles using a sprayer is one tool that will save you a ton of time and make this easy now this is the Flex Co 5000 from Wagner which is a high velocity low pressure or HVLP sprayer it's got a wide spray nozzle and a fine detail nozzle which is the one that I used and it's perfect for getting into the spindles and not wasting a lot of material I started off and I was getting a lot of drips so I dialed back the material output and then it was just right I'll have a link below to the flexi oh and all the different tools that I used in this build that are gonna make your job easier I sprayed one rail section at a time doing the top and bottom rails and the three sides of the spindles that I could get to from there after spraying I back brushed the stain onto the wood to smooth it out and fix any drips or heavy spots the combo of a sprayer and a brush is a great way to quickly get the stain on the railings and get a smooth finish I used a ladder to get the backsides of the post in the outside of the railings and spindles and after finishing up spraying all the vertical surfaces I could then move on to the deck floor all right we have all the railings and the post done so now it's time for the deck and for the deck instead of spraying it because we did tape it up to do that I'm going to use a lamb's wool applicator I think this might go on better I'm gonna find out how it works in between the cracks here but one thing to note when you get these out of the package there's gonna be a lot of little fur on there so one of the things you can do is take some blue tape wrap it around and then pull it off and now that'll get rid of most of the loose fibers and that way they won't come off on to the finish I put the staining pad on the end of a pole and I fill the page right excuse me spill the paint tray with this day this is not paint guys so pour it slowly now after cleaning up my little mess I started on the far end of the deck using the lamb's wool pad I really like this thing it put down a ton of stain at one time and did a great job of getting into the cracks and crevices of the wood I realized I probably should be cutting in the edges there so I started doing that after the first few rows and working ahead of the staining pen now the nice part about using the pad on a pole is that it's smooth is finished out just like brushing so instead of spraying the floor and then having to go back and back brush any puddling all I had to do is one stroke and it was all done in one step as I worked my way across the deck I got into a groove and I was doing three or four boards at a time it's good to keep a wet edge and do the full length of a board all at the same time in doing three or four at once seemed like the sweet spot to do it efficiently for me and one area to look out for though is between the board's sometimes the stain pad did a good job of getting down between them but if they were uneven or too tightly spaced it didn't really work as well so I went back and I turned the pad sideways and I would run it down the gap between the board's if I saw this happening in some spots even I did have to go back with a brush and fill that in if the pad wasn't doing the trick but this was definitely the most satisfying part of the project seeing that new stain go on and instantly revive the worn out deck boards was awesome I worked my way off the deck and down the stairs and then I could let that first coat dry there's been about an hour and a half it says one to two hour to dry is very warm outside today it's over 80 degrees so it is doing good you just want to make sure that it's not sticky before you put on that second coat so for the second coat we're just going to go over it and the coverage is gonna be a lot better on the second coat because it's already soaked down into the wood so I'm gonna go through and do that second coat on the floor before the Sun starts to come in it's always best to work out of the direct sunlight so the stain doesn't dry too fast when I put on that second coat it really did a good job turning some of those lighter areas like where I had sanded the stains before and making them a lot darker after drying for another few hours the deck turned out amazing and it went from nasty and bleached out to rich and ready for a steady summer of barbecues and after its cured for a few days we'll be putting the refinished outdoor furniture back on it and enjoying it all season if you wanna check out how I refinished all the furniture to go on the deck the video is queued up for you right there I want to give you a huge shout out to all the folks joining the Builders Club you can check information down below and I'll catch you on the next video

Channel: Fix This Build That

Views: 2,162,514

Keywords: woodworking, woodwork, diy, how to, diy project, fixthisbuildthat, fix this build that

Id: jBXnfLe3lzs

Length: 11min 3sec (663 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 06 2020