Our deck was is decent condition when we bought our home in 2017. The deck’s color maintained throughout the years, probably because it’s in such a shaded area. However, we did notice a trend each late summer and fall and we noticed mildew or algae of some sort was accumulating on our home’s siding. That required us to power wash the siding each year. We never did think to power wash the deck until we noticed this year that the mildew/algae was growing on the wood as well. So, we decided to power wash our deck and re-stain/seal it. Overall it took a weekend to complete (we did have to wait for a weekend with a forecast of no rain), but overall it was super simple and actually Ana did everything on her own without me. 😁

Link to our Project Checklist

3 simple steps to refinishing a deck:

  • Power wash
  • Sand (if needed – some areas of the wood can get raised up, a quick sanding to smooth it back down)
  • Stain/Seal

This took a weekend to do and we think it will help with the mildew/algae growth on the side of our house! We aren’t in LOVE with the color that turned up but that was because we bought a deck stain that was in the clearance area of the Lowe’s paint section. Buying clearance stain/sealer saved us 75% on our project! 😲 Below is a list of the tools that we used, along with a link to our checklist which includes tools and everything we bought for our project.

Tools that we used 🛠 [Link to our project checklist]:

  • Pressure Washer – We borrowed our parents pressure washer and I think it’s an older model of the one that’s linked to the left
  • Palm Sander
  • Paint Rollers & Extending pole
  • 3/8″ nap paint roller head
  • Paint tin tray
  • A dirty rag (to apply stain to the hand rails)

So if your deck is in a similar condition as ours, the mildew is just so ANNOYING to deal with. Every year we need to clean the side of our house otherwise it will just continue to spread to higher and harder to reach places. We noticed the mildew started growing on our deck near the side of the house, but it hadn’t yet migrated to the siding yet. So with us cleaning and sealing the deck early this year we hope we solved the root cause of the mildew issue.

Obvious first step, pressure wash the deck. I think the real precaution to take is to first test the pressure washer on a somewhat hidden area of the deck (in case things go wrong). Depending on your pressure washer max strength, you can potentially do some damage to your deck. So we recommend to test the strength on an area of the deck that isn’t too visible. With our pressure washer we were able to remove all of our mildew and some of the stain. No damage from the pressure, so we didn’t need to sand anything down.

We waited about 24 hours before staining/sealing. The instructions on the stain did say to wait 48 hours after washing before staining, but our conditions were sunny all day long and pretty low humidity so we decided to wait just under 24 hours. 😎 Last year, when we were browsing the paint section in Lowes for our bathroom remodel, we took a quick gander at the clearance section and stumbled upon two tins of this deck water seal for 5 dollars each (original price 39 bucks EACH)!

As you can see in the pic above, Ana used a rag to apply the stain on the hand rails and there was such a noticeable difference already. We also do have our Project Supervisor (Feeny) watching Ana to make sure she applied the stain correctly. 😆

After painting the railings Ana moved on to staining the floor boards. We used a pole extender here to make this more ergonomic. If you don’t have an extender I would honestly consider finding a pole or a stick and duck tape that to the handle, otherwise you’ll have a hard time staining the whole deck. It’s a pretty simple procedure, it’s just like painting walls, except way easier. Below is the “before” and “after”.

Above is a side by side comparison of our stairs before and after we applied the stain.

After letting the stain dry for 24 hours we were able to put our furniture back on and enjoy our evenings out on the deck! 😎 We are super happy with the results. It was simple and timely, we do think next year we will reapply another coat to fill in some of the lighter areas and after that we should be good for a few years.

Project Completed June 7, 2020