Subtitled "Why Didn't Anyone Tell Me Cedar is Orange!"
So I decided to take up a little home improvement project the other day. I remember many times "helping" my dad with projects which generally consisted of me just being bored and doing one or two things here or there. My brother seems to have taken much more of a liking to it at an earlier age.
Of course, now that I'm an adult (debatable, I know) I've become very interested in many such projects and always get upset at myself for not paying more attention. It is also generally when I really miss my dad, I would like to be able to call him up and get his advice on how to do something or other. But I digress.
So our house has a large deck in back but it was in terrible shape. Here is a picture of what it looked like in a particularly bad section.
So I decided to re-stain it. First I saw in the store some "stainable" wood filler, I used that to fill in some of cracks and holes. That was the beginning of my demise. The next day I rented a big floor sander/buffer from Home Depot and went to town with coarse grit sandpaper. It drastically improved the deep grooves and splits and holes in the wood, but I ran out of time before I could get it truly smooth (I was only going to pay for 4 hours). Then I got some deck wash and washed off the whole thing.
The previous owners left behind a full gallon of cedar toned semi-transparent stain. I thought that was what they used. WRONG! So I bought some more and (luckily) tried it over the wood filled areas. Well, it looked hideous because the wood filler was basically white when dry. So I knew I had to get some opaque stain. I planned on using the cedar-toned transparent stain on the railings, so I stuck with a cedar toned solid stain for the main deck. That was my second, and biggest, mistake.
I didn't know what kind of wood I had, mostly because I have no idea what each type of wood looks like. I'm now pretty sure I have redwood (after looking at wood at the store). So the semi-transparent stuff on the railings looks fantastic, even though it is cedar toned on redwood. The cedar solid stain, on the other hand, is orange. Orange I tell you, pure orange! Madness! Note the bright squares in the photos below are just due to sun reflections, the deck doesn't really have those sections.
I know two-toned decks are okay, but both tones should actually look good. Usually the deck is the part that is semi-transparent. I'm glad I used the filler, it needed it, but I would be much happier had I used a redwood deck stain to match the railings.
Oh, and I bought the good stuff so the good news is that after another 10 years I'll be able to fix it :-) (I'm being sarcastic, of course). The worst part is that I saw in the samples that cedar solid doesn't really match cedar tone on redwood. By then I was suspecting I had redwood, but I thought it not prudent to go with different wood tones. Oh well, hopefully the orange...I mean cedar...color will fade with time. Meanwhile we got a nice orange glow in our kitchen and family room today from the reflection of the sun off the deck and into our house THROUGH THE CLOSED BLINDS. At least the helicopter will have a target to drop supplies on if Denver is ever completely covered in snow.
P.S. Whatever you do don't buy cedar solid stain Behr brand, unless you like bright orange.
