Pressure wash and restain a deck

Be careful with pressure washing. Have you done it before? You need enough pressure to clean using a fan spray. Pointed will tear into the wood and make it ugly.

Depending on climate, I'd wait at least a week, maybe two before staining.

Cleaner? If you were going to use a scrub brush and hose instead of pressure washer, that would be a good idea.

Do you have to wait that long if you use water-based stain?

What is your deck made of ? cedar, green PT, brown PT, other .. ? John T.

I assume brown pressure treated wood. It's been there for decades. We bought the house in 2008 and it was already built. The house is 1967.

If it has held up that long it is the old pressure treated lumber where arsenic was used. Should not need fungicide treatment.

I never recalled washing my deck before staining with Thompson water sealing stain that would not really last more than a couple of years.

Stains and paints have been reformulated over the years to get rid of volatile organic compounds (VOC's) and got crappy so now I do not know what is best since I replace my deck with a Trex deck.

Be sure to read the last paragraph.

I presume you're doing this for looks rather than preservation??

I got carried away with being a good homeowner and decided to do the same thing 20 or 30 years ago. The house was built in 1979 and the floor of the deck was dull grey and boring, but not decaying. I just used a garden hose with a pointy nozzle. Probably waited a week but I don't know if that's too much or too little. Then covered with one of those deck preservatives, like from Behr. It didn't look like varnished or laquered furniture. Still had no grain. It looked just a little better than before.

Jump ahead 10 years, the floor boards were still good, but the wood holding up the deck, the painted 2x6's on the sides and the ones in the middle that I could not see, were rotting. (The 4x4 legs, about a foot long, were still good.) My second floor overhangs the 1st floor deck by

Unfortunately the HOA could see my deck even without going on my property and iirc they insisted I do something, or maybe it was that they called the county that insisted. I live in a townhouse and space is short, and I had glorious plans to built a moveable deck that could be raised (using counter-weights or something) to disclose a newly built stairway to a newly built entrance to the basement. I had thought about this even before the rotting deck was a problem, and while I fantasized some more, the county deadline got closer, So I decided to tear the deck down, but when I got to that 2.5 foot mark, I saw it was still in good shape, so I bought a reciprocating saw and cut the support 2x6's off there. I'd moved the 4x4 legs that held it up, and I put a 1x6 board across the front to make it look nice.

Everything was done by one day before the deadline, when I noticed that the deck was higher than it used to be. That is, the ground at that spot was lower than it was where the front of the deck had been, and the one inch put it above the height which required a stairway. I though of building a stairs, but decided to spread dirt and flagstones in front of the deck to make it the right height. I wasn't home when the inspector returned the next day, but he said it was okay.

Now i have a smaller deck but a bigger yard.

Upshot, the must-have-been-treated floor boards were still pretty good when the couldn't-have-been-treated support lumber was rotting, so why bother using fungicide on the floor if the support can rot out underneath it!! Maybe your deck is entirely treated lumber. Is that the way it's supposed to be?

I have 4 wooden decks at my current house, all built by me, 3 decks at my previous house, all built by me, and one large deck at the house before that, built by the homebuilder. My rule for restain prep work is to determine what is needed, and then do only that. If the deck needs repairs, do those before anything else. If there's moss, algae, fungus, etc, then consider power washing, but otherwise don't bother. And so on.

When I restain, I sweep away any debris, then I use a leaf blower to remove any loose dust. That's it, I'm ready to reapply a new coat of stain.

BTW, congrats on maintaining a deck that's decades old. Depending on climate, many wooden decks don't last that long.

In my limited experience, I've never seen a deck that was built with untreated lumber. To me, that sounds like a DIY project gone wrong.

So that shouldn't be a problem for the OP.

Maybe it was an improper builder's way to save money. He did a couple other things wrong too, one of them in the houses that were built before mine, one of them in the streets, but no complaints about the rest of my house.

Pressure treated did not become popular until the 1970s or so. I've seem some decks that were not PT and properly cared for, lasted a very long time.

For my last house, I used this to replace the PT deck. Price I paid was much less than listed here. Looked great for years too.

I wasn't looking at deck construction that long ago, so that explains why I haven't seen a deck built with non-PT lumber. It's probably safe to say that very few, or even none, have survived to this day.

PT pine decking is less than a dollar a foot where I live, so the price of cumaru listed on that site is more than 5x the price. It would take an extreme discount to get my attention. Even Trex isn't that precious.

Before I switched to composite decking (best move I ever made, deckwize) I used a mix ofT SP, bleach, and washing powder and a broom. Had the same effect as pressure washing - removing lignin from the grain exposing the harder wood. This was on Southern Yellow Pine.I also often used the pressure washer to peal off the old stain that didn't want to stay on any more. Other than my railing and posts that crapo is all in the past now (and I was able to replace my back deck with composite for less than pressure treated due to luck and good timing (walked into Home Depot when an internet order had just been returned - got it for 50 cents on the dollar)

My untreated southern yellow pine deck lasted 20 years. My untreated cedar front porch/deck lasted about 25. My treated deck didn't make

1. At 72 I don't think I'll live long enough to worry about my current composit decks

it. Heated under pressure - it is harder and denser than "raw" wood and has NO fungal spores or bacteria in it

I know it has some process but not sure of details. Only thing I every did to it was an oil type stuff brushed or rolled on. When we sold the house, it was 15 years old and looked about the same as when I put it in.

My hot tub deck and front veranda are both made from teak. I expect them both to survive for decades.

I am in the process of replacing just such a deck, built with clear cedar decking and untreated sub-structure. The structure is seriously rotted.

What were you thinking? Do you have no brain, sheesh!!!???

I was thinking this old deck needs to be replaced. What else should I think?