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About This Project
Before you revive a tired-looking deck, look it over to see that all the wood surfaces are sound. If the wood is rotten, a screwdriver will push easily into the wood and the surface fibers will pull away easily. No amount of cleaning is going to bring it back. If you have damaged wood, replace it with new.
Deck cleaners are formulated to clean a deck surface whether it has a stain or sealer on it or not. However, if you have an old finish that's worn out, the cleaner will do a blotchy job. It'll clean the worn spots differently from the spots that still have finish on them. Look for signs of an old finish line. A stain finish is easy to spot because it leaves signs of wear in high-traffic areas. A sealer is harder to spot, but you can tell if it's worn out because it'll no longer bead water. Old sealers usually will come off with a deck cleaner. Look for a film in areas with lower traffic. If you detect a film, use a stripper on the railing (like we did) to get rid of it before you apply a cleaner. Examine the railing in the same manner as the deck boards.
The deck stripper is designed to lift off the old finish (stain or sealer) and get the surface ready for the deck cleaner to do its work. Save time and stripper solution by first scraping away most of the old finish residue, using an ordinary paint scraper. It may sound daunting, but keep in mind that you don't need to get down to bare wood! Just scrape the surface enough to remove loose, flaky finish. Don't spend more than two hours doing this on an average-size (10 x 16-ft.) deck.
The deck we cleaned for this article had all sound wood, but the semitransparent oil finish on the railing was starting to flake off. So we stripped the railings before applying a cleaner. The deck boards, on the other hand, were unfinished, so we used a deck cleaner only. It had been several years since this deck had received any attention, but it cleaned up beautifully.
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