How to Paint Your House (and why you may not want to paint your barn)

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Choose a Stain & Let There be Grain!

Painting is one thing, but finishing wood so the beauty of grain patterns show through involves different products, techniques and maintenance schedules. If you want opaque colors and are willing to refinish diligently, then paint is for you. But tired stain looks better than tired paint. If you’re planning to be lazy, then staining, which requires less prep work than for film-forming finishes, is your best bet.

As you assess wood-grain friendly finishing options, pay attention. None of the terms used to describe non-paint, outdoor wood finishes are standardized, so you need to read between the lines to see what you’re really getting.

If your wood is new, and you’d like the most refined appearance possible, then a tinted, transparent film-forming finish is worth a look. Think of it like colored varnish. It forms a surface coating while adding color that lets wood grain show through prominently. Just be careful. You’ll definitely need to start by removing mill glaze for best results. Film-forming products will peel otherwise. The best formulations require renewal every 18 to 36 months on decks, less often on vertical surfaces.

Soak-in stains (often called “semi-transparent” stains) are different. They’re well-suited to older wood surfaces where some weathering and cracking has begun to set in. Stains like these impart color to the surface (hiding gray color pretty well), but form no surface film that could peel in time. Most soak-ins offer a 12- to 48-month lifespan under real-world conditions.

Clear, water-repellent finishes help retain the look of new wood without imparting much color of their own. They also need to be reapplied every 12 months. Maintenance usually involves the use of a wood brightener to restore a light, new-wood color before recoating.

One Time Only?

Five years ago I discovered an exterior wood-finishing product that made me shake my head in disbelief. Lifetime Wood Treatment claimed the same ridiculous thing that its name implies. Put this stuff on once, and the finish remains forever. Really? How can it be?

Since 2002, I’ve applied about five gallons of Lifetime on various projects around my homestead. And after watching the results closely, I like the product a lot.

Lifetime Wood Treatment [(250) 538-5516] comes as a powder. You mix it with water, then apply it with a brush, roller, sprayer or by dipping. The main thing to understand about Lifetime is that it neither forms surface film nor adds any color to the wood directly. Instead, the tea-colored solution causes the wood surface to turn an olive gray by chemical reaction. You’ll first notice the darkening action within minutes of application, continuing for a day or so until the wood looks like it’s been sitting outside for several years. But unlike ordinary weathering, the appearance created by Lifetime is only as even as your application job. The look is too casual for some folks, but just right for people who don’t like to paint and repaint. As long as every part of the surface has been made wet, the gray color is nice and even in appearance. I use a pump-up weed sprayer to speed application (this sprayer is never used for anything else), but take care. Some herblike components of the powder don’t dissolve, and they’ll clog up your sprayer nozzle pretty quickly if you don’t filter the liquid through a cloth as you fill the sprayer.

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