Refinishing our deck

When we bought our house 3 1/2 years ago the deck was painted a hideous pinkish color. And 1/3 was elevated 8 inches or so and had a semi circle cutout on the end because there had once been a hot tub next to it. We had the elevated part replaced 3 years ago with nice ipe wood to match the height of the rest. And we repainted the old part a darker brownish color and stained the new part.

SO has decided to strip the whole thing and stain it all a natural wood color. It would definitely look nicer and since we’re getting to the point where most stuff we wanted to do is done I suppose it makes sense to do minor stuff like this. He’s done four rounds with a supposedly environmentally friendly product called woodluxe by Benjamin Moore. At this point he’s ready to buy a harsh paint stripper to finish because the woodluxe clearly isn’t going to do the job.

Have any of you stripped a deck before? Any recommendations on what to use? Or best ways to use it?

I can’t help with your question, but already our deck, the floor of it anyway, needs re-staining. It was just stained last year.


I. Hate. Decks.

in order to appease my deck hate, this year I just threw money at the problem and bought outdoor rugs and fru fru pillow stuff, things I have never in my life had. we have an extensive collection of tropical plants that live in our house during the winter so that helps a lot. See we even have a miniature orange tree.

I will also throw a ton of money at annuals to put in some of the pots. Most years. I spend very little on annuals in pots.

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and here is a small flowered clematis vine climbing up near our deck railing so it helps with the ugly deck problem. I highly recommend miniature clematis. Their little flowers are just so dang cute!

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SO plans to restrain at least every couple of years. That seems annoying but probably necessary given how much fading happened in 3 years on the stained wood part of it.

I used to be such a wood purist; everything had to be real wood. I've reluctantly relaxed that stance as I've gotten older, especially in some of the higher maintenance situations, decking being one of them. We just replaced our small front deck and stairs with TimberTech, a faux wood product and it looks really good. We are not interested in re-staining every couple of years.

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Originally Posted by rosarugosa

I used to be such a wood purist; everything had to be real wood. I've reluctantly relaxed that stance as I've gotten older, especially in some of the higher maintenance situations, decking being one of them. We just replaced our small front deck and stairs with TimberTech, a faux wood product and it looks really good. We are not interested in re-staining every couple of years.

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We did the same thing. Our ranch style house has a walk-out basement which results in my rear, family room exit being approximately 8 feet off the ground. I built a fairly extensive two level deck 28 years ago and over time got really, really tired of all the maintenance that went into keeping it looking nice. So, 3 years ago I had all the decking and stairs replaced with Trex composite decking and am still very much pleased with the result. The material was kind of pricey, even during that covid period when real lumber products sky-rocketed in price but the low maintenance aspect made it worthwhile. Plus, it looks wonderful!

Instead of stripping, can he sand?

I am jealous of you people with fake wood. I just checked it on the Internet and it looks pretty good.

one of the problems of our deck is that it is bigger than I wanted it to be, so not only is it ugly, it’s a big amount of ugliness. But the size makes perfect sense for the space so I understand why it was drawn this way.

The front of our house has brick and stone walks and stone walls so that is lovely. I really miss my beautiful brick patio in the city.

Sorry, no help from me. We replaced our deck with a patio a couple years ago.

We considered trex 3 years ago but didn’t want to spend the money to completely redo the deck since ipe lasts a very long time and it was (and still is) in great shape. If we’d been starting from scratch we probably would’ve gone that route.

SO did the first round of regular stripper today and it accomplished more than four coats of the less brutal stuff. A couple more times with this stuff and it should be done. We leave on vacation Tuesday morning so his goal is to have it done before we go so it can rest and then he can do the staining once we get home.