5 Tips And Tricks To Staining Your Wooden Fence in St. Louis, MO

As a homeowner, you might want to improve the look of your property by adding a fence — and if it happens to be a wooden fence, you may not wish to just let it stay in its natural untreated state.

For example, you may very well wish to stain the fence to both protect it from the elements and also make the fence generally look better than it would look if it were just to be as it is freshly built.

With that being the case, here are five tips and tricks to staining your wooden fence in St. Louis, MO.

1. Plan The Staining Work Well In Advance

You might be inclined to think that you could just get up in the morning and begin the staining project without any sort of planning beforehand, but this is not at all the case.

A good wooden fence staining project requires some forethought and planning such that you don’t end up spending more time than you would have had you made no plans regarding it whatsoever.

It bears knowing how much fence you have, in terms of surface area, such that you will know about how much stain you will need to have before you even lift the brush for the first time.

It is considerably better to have a little too much stain left over (not too much, mind you) than to find yourself running out of stain halfway through the project and then have to run to the store and buy some more.

2. Clean Before You Do Anything Else

Unless you literally had just finished building the fence, there is going to have to be some time that you will spend cleaning the fence before you actually start the staining project.

There are all sorts of things that can find themselves on your standard wooden fence from bits of dust and dirt to the more insidious mildew and mold, which if not treated well will cause you problems down the road.

There are many ways to clean your fence depending on what it is that you are cleaning but ultimately you are going to want to get it fully clean and then you’re going to need to make time to allow your fence to fully dry before you move on.

3. Test To See If It Needs To Be Sanded

Of course the simplest thing to do would be to just presume that you have a wooden fence and that it necessarily needs to be sanded, but if you are at all short on time you can do a fairly simple test to see if it really is necessary.

Take a little bit of water in a spray bottle and spray a small area of the fence — you will want to see how the wood reacts to the water.

If the water beads up on the surface of your wooden fence, you will know that it is a sign that it is in need of sanding — the fact that the water is beading up means that the wood will not have a good response to stain either, and you will find yourself with stain beading up on the surface of the fence.

If on the other hand the water is absorbed by the wood, you will know that the wooden fence will take the stain quite well.

4. Make Sure The Timing Is Right

You’re going to want to make sure that the timing is right for your staining project — for example, you don’t want to stain a wooden fence right after it rains as the fence will be still wet, and you certainly won’t want to start a staining project if rain is going to be predicted for the twenty-four hours afterward.

Another consideration to bear in mind is that you shouldn’t really stain a wooden fence right after it has been built — it needs time to rest as it were and to have the pores be ready for the staining.

This means that you should ideally wait at least three weeks after you have finished building your wooden fence to stain it.

5. Make Sure You Can Bear The Weight Of A Roller

If you’ve ever held a paint roller, you know that when it doesn’t even have anything on it, it can have quite a bit of a heft.

You can just imagine that when it is loaded with paint it will be much more so heavy.

Before you commit to a paint roller you should make sure that you are going to be able to hold it and stain with it for the duration of the staining project.

We would love the opportunity to be your go-to exterior painter in St. Louis, MO. Call us at 314-582-5272 to book a FREE estimate, and let us help you enhance the interior of your home so you can focus on other things.

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