If you read our blog post yesterday, you’d know that we covered all the pros and cons for painting your deck. Today, let’s review the pros and cons of staining your deck.
Staining your Deck
When choosing to stain your deck, you’re protecting it from outdoor elements, while also maintaining and enhancing its original and natural beauty. Your deck is probably made from beautiful wood, featuring lots of natural elements. You probably want to highlight its unique characteristics and grain. It’s most common to decide on a semi-transparent stain, though stain’s offer lots of other options, including:
- Solid stains. Solid stains create a more uniform look. It covers most of the woods elements, and it also acts similarly to a paint.
- Semi-transparent stains. These stains offer a touch of colour, but also allows the woods characteristics to show through the stain. In addition to this, they provide weatherproofing to ensure a long life.
- Clear coat. In cases where you have naturally colourful wood, and you don’t want to cover that with stain, a cleat coat may be best. A clear coat will allow your wood to show it’s natural colour, while also protecting your wood from outdoor conditions, like weather, and mold or mildew.
The pros of staining your deck include:
- Choosing how much of the wood’s colour, grain, and texture remain visible. When painting your deck, you cover the entire surface with an opaque coating. However, when staining, you decide how much or how little of the natural wood will show through.
- A quality stain penetrates the wood. If a high-quality product is used on your wood, it seals the wood grain. This will prevent moisture from entering the wood, ultimately causing it to rot. Quality stains often provide much better moisture retention than paint.
- Stain in generally less slippery than a paint. Some stains are quite slick. For the most part, they’re flatter and create a less slippery surface than a thick, quality paint job. If safety is a concern for you deck, or if you have small children, stain is generally a better option.
Some of the cons of staining your deck include:
- Staining doesn’t fill cracks. Paint can be used to cover flaws in the surface, like cracks or chips. The paint will fill in grooves or small holes in the wood. Stain isn’t quite as reliable when it comes to filling cracks. Stain is much thinner than paint, and won’t be of much help if you’re looking to hide imperfections in the deck.
- Certain imported top-quality wood doesn’t hold stain very well. Imported tropical wood makes for a gorgeous deck, however, they can be very dense and don’t usually hold a stain well. Likely, because you’re dealing with a top-quality wood, you’ll only want to enhance the woods beauty, and a clear coat will probably be your best option!
Hopefully this is enough information to help you make your decision. For any additional information or general inquires, please contact us directly! We would be happy to provide answers to your questions.
Sincerely,
Van Isle Paint
Victoria, BC, and Beyond
(250) 412-3885
For further insights and informative content from Van Isle Paint, please visit our blog: https://vanislepaint.com/blog/
