CWF-UV5 Cedar Stain for Wood Decks proved to be 2016's best stain of the year, as per my assessment of all products/stains and sealants for applying to Wood Decks and Fences.
We tried every product on the market in 2016 and we were very interested in finding a product that was of the highest quality. We wanted to find one that had a very high rating going into the application, had a nice finish, had a nice finish color and had the highest approval rating by my customers. In the continuing year I will go back and assess each product and how it holds up as time goes by.
Trying so many different products took lots of man-hours, so much time. I can promise you that the big box hardware stores will do everything in their power to convince you to buy their products. But, each product is different and each has variables that only a contractor, like myself, thirty years cleaning wood decks, can teach you about.
Every product produces a different result. No two products are the same. Some products behave completely different from other products. Some are easier to apply than others. Some seem to have almost a polyurethane like finish. Others have a seemingly plastic-like finish. Oil is better for wood, and those products that contain oil, they look best. Silicone finishes are hard to work with. These are just a few thoughts on a multitude of topics related to deck refinishing.
Here is a deck completed with Cedar CWF-UV5. It is in the process of just being finished and looks a tiny bit wet in various sections while taking this shot.
Some of the other colors that were popular were the CWF-UV5 Honey-gold. It is rich in pigment and having more pigment keeps the wood looking newer for a longer period of time. Here, you can see the deck mid-way through the staining process,after having been cleaned.
CWF UV5, Honey-gold
I used another product that is ranked highly on national, private polls, and it was the first year that my company has used stains by Sherwin Williams. The Sherwin Williams product was very rich with color, always a good feature. I tried to highlight the beauty of the following deck with a few shots with my camera. The pigment was so rich that it was easy to use overtop brand new wood. That is not common. Typically, when I replace a piece of wood, I can tell the wood has been replaced when I have stained the deck. With Sherwin Williams' product, it makes it virtually impossible.
One product that I would not recommend using for any person, novice or professional is the Thompson's Acrylic colored sealant. The deck below was sealed with this product and it was extremely hard to use. The price seemed right at less than $20 per gallon, but the finish was not one that showed the wood-grain well. It took numerous coats to make it look perfect. The key with this product is to not let the wood finish dry, if you are going to put two coats on the deck, do one right after the other. If you do not, you are going to have problems. Total commitment is the earmark of this product. It is acrylic and it does not have the tendencies of normal sealants with an oil base. We were able to make it look perfect, but many man hours were used to get the job done.
I believe the color was called Harvest Gold, Thompson's, super hard to work with
Now, let me talk about a very beautiful product called Cabot brand, Australian Timber Oil. The appearance of this product is luxurious. It is an incredibly beautiful product with a finish that reminds me of freshly finished wood floors. I am skeptical how well this product will hold up over the coming year, but I will be checking at the one year mark. You have to use nearly twice as much product, which makes the cost very expensive, but the finish is undeniably beautiful. The deck I am about to show you was finished by a gentleman who probably did not put enough of the product on the deck. I had to come and strip the old finish off of the deck and then apply twice as much product that I would have had to use with nearly any other product. It did look beautiful when done. Other water-sealant companies have tried to mimic this product, but only Cabot brand seemed to really look super rich.
Cabot brand, Australian Timber Oil
Solid finished decks were a hit this past year. We were working on decking on River Road in Richmond, VA and we were able to take a twelve hundred square foot deck and use it over a previous stain and make it look new again. My company used forty-two, sixteen foot boards to bring the deck back to life. The customer and I chose colors that matched colors we could see in the stone to make the wood look brilliant and new. This was the biggest job we finished in 2016 and you can see how nice it looked after the transformation. Here are a few pictures.
This was Behr brand solid stain, a product I liked and would recommend using. It covered well and had a nice appearance.
I used Olympic Cedar Maximum on a deck at the beginning of the season. Olympic, and all companies, changed the formulation of their products to become V.O.C. compliant- Volatile Organic Compound. Virginia was one of the last states to comply with the new EPA regulations and only time will tell how the product holds up. It was much different than what I have used in the past. This one deck was for a previous customer of over fifteen years and he was shocked by the cost of using the new EPA compliant product. We had to use a lot more to get a nice finish. Olympic is found at Lowes, primarily, and I can say definitively that it is not the same product. It use to be rich in its appearance. It still looks nice, but it is completely different, now.
Olympic Maximum Cedar
Sikkens is a name I will not be using in the future. I will only use it if the wood is new. And, only the Cetol make of the product will I use. It is very expensive, hard to find- usually only at specialty paint stores. So, a few tips on Sikkens products, I am a certified professional that had to take a course in order to become certified to use it. It is not supposed to be removed when reapplying. A deck can be cleaned before reapplying. When I cleaned the following deck along the James River, I had to come back with two coats and my customer was not happy with the appearance. I could agree with her. To remove the stain, which is what I would have had to do to have uniformity, it would be necessary to sand off all of the old product. We tried to do that, reapply, it never did look right. I racked my head for hours, spoke to technical support at Sikkens and no good solution could be found to simplify and lessen the cost of the undertaking. Finally, I, for the first time in my many years of doing this type of work, had to bow down and accept defeat. A solid color was used and frankly, for the landscape of the yard, it was the perfect solution. So, below, see how it looked after being finished with a semi-transparent finish and what it looked like after I came back and finished with a solid.
Sikkens Cetol brand product did not look right, no matter what we tried. Finally, switched to solid finish and achieved a nice result. Gorgeous view!
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