OK, so I'm at my wit's end. Deck is 100% cedar except for the pt 6x6 verticals. Built in 2003 along with the house. We've stripped and stained it probably 5 times now and frankly I'm getting tired of it. Need a better solution here.
The stain we've used the last couple times is the Behr Premium outdoor stain/waterproofing, the photos attached show what the deck looks like after about 7-8 months from 3 coats on stripped wood...this thing was stripped and weatherproofed around Sept/Oct of 2010. You can see its coming up in sheets, looks as though none of it has soaked into the wood at all, this stuff is coming off like unprimed paint. I'm thinking this has to be a missed step in the prep work, but I don't know what I didn't do right. This stuff should be soaking into the cedar, right? I expected this stuff to last at least 4-5x longer.
I don't mind or object to doing touchups, putting on a topcoat every spring or so, but this is just plain crazy that I have to strip it all down and redo the damn thing over and over again. We're talking about probably 500 sf of decking and roughly 70 linear feet of fencing...its a huge deck.
My current thought is I'm going to have to sand the whole damn thing not, verticals, spindles, railings and all...it'll take me weeks of time to get this done, but when I'm done it'll look new and I'll want to lay down some stain and weather rpoofing right away.
So my question is, how should I proceed here? I cannot keep putting this kind of labor and money into this deck...the wife says fix it or she's going to have someone come and cut it off the sode of the house while I'm at work someday. If I had any idea of the effort involved in a deck I would have paid the extra and gone with the fake wood decking.
The stain we've used the last couple times is the Behr Premium outdoor stain/waterproofing, the photos attached show what the deck looks like after about 7-8 months from 3 coats on stripped wood...this thing was stripped and weatherproofed around Sept/Oct of 2010. You can see its coming up in sheets, looks as though none of it has soaked into the wood at all, this stuff is coming off like unprimed paint. I'm thinking this has to be a missed step in the prep work, but I don't know what I didn't do right. This stuff should be soaking into the cedar, right? I expected this stuff to last at least 4-5x longer.
I don't mind or object to doing touchups, putting on a topcoat every spring or so, but this is just plain crazy that I have to strip it all down and redo the damn thing over and over again. We're talking about probably 500 sf of decking and roughly 70 linear feet of fencing...its a huge deck.
My current thought is I'm going to have to sand the whole damn thing not, verticals, spindles, railings and all...it'll take me weeks of time to get this done, but when I'm done it'll look new and I'll want to lay down some stain and weather rpoofing right away.
So my question is, how should I proceed here? I cannot keep putting this kind of labor and money into this deck...the wife says fix it or she's going to have someone come and cut it off the sode of the house while I'm at work someday. If I had any idea of the effort involved in a deck I would have paid the extra and gone with the fake wood decking.