Clean, and seal/stain Cedar fence

In April of 2013, I had a beau­ti­ful cedar fence  built for my pup­py boy. Now, April of 2017, 4 years lat­er, it def­i­nite­ly does­n’t look like new. It has that cedar weath­er­ing to it which is beau­ti­ful if you are at the beach, but for my hum­ble, home­ly house it just looks washed out.

This is what it orig­i­nal­ly looked like. See how gor­geous it was?

My rec­om­men­da­tion if you have a cedar fence is to do the CWF as quick­ly as pos­si­ble to main­tain the col­or. I chose a “trans­par­ent” one, but they always put a lit­tle stain on it. This is pret­ty darn close to trans­par­ent, how­ev­er. I’m won­der­ing now if I should have got­ten the “cedar” one.

Here are the big play­ers!

That is: 1) Flood CWF-UV, 2)Multi-sprayer, and 3)Cleaner. I used 30 Sec­onds Clean­er which I end­ed up run­ning out of, spray­ing myself in the face with, and mess­ing up the con­cen­tra­tions. It has bleach in it, fyi. And of course you need paint stuff and I would rec­om­mend eye pro­tec­tion and dis­pos­able gloves.

I for­got to take an ini­tial pic­ture until I start­ed, so here is one a few min­utes in:

The bleach solu­tion was super easy to use. Here’s a com­par­i­son after just a few min­utes:

Just be care­ful with the solu­tion being too pow­er­ful or too con­cen­trat­ed oth­er­wise you get a super bleached one. The prob­lem was that I ran out of solu­tion and it got to the very bot­tom. I guess I had­n’t mixed it well so I’m pret­ty sure that’s almost pure con­cen­trate. It real­ly did a num­ber to the wood too! Bent it!

I ran out of clean­er, so I wast­ed 2 hours wan­der­ing around stores look­ing for it to no avail. Make sure you get enough. By the time I got back, it was dried. I think I was sup­posed to hose it off…

Notice how the first batch (the left half) was too con­cen­trat­ed, while the sec­ond batch (the right half) looks more nat­ur­al, so I assume I was clos­er to the right ratio.

Now for the inten­sive part.…I did it all by hand as the fence builder years ago rec­om­mend­ed. You could do paint gun for speed (after the hours of hand work, I was seri­ous­ly con­tem­plat­ing.…) but as he explained, the man­u­al method will make sure it gets into every groove. The cedar is so tex­tured, I get why, but by gol­ly it took FOREVER. If I was able to do this every week­end it would­n’t be an issue, but I can’t. So. Any­ways, hours lat­er, I get this result. And the oth­er side of the house thrown in too.

Not near­ly as beau­ti­ful as it’s orig­i­nal glo­ry (nor in terms of scent either!) but it’s much more pleas­ing to the aver­age eye. At least in my opin­ion.

Here are the com­par­isons in chrono­log­i­cal order:

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Well there you go!! Easy, just mind numb­ing. And smelly.