John Shearer: This deck has been exposed to the sun and the rain, moisture, ultraviolet radiation. It’s significantly darker than it was when it was new. The previous coating that’s on there has completely failed, and I’m going to take you through a process of cleaning this wood and then refinishing it.
So here’s some of the deck surface a little bit closer up. As you see here, this is the previous – there’s a previous coating on here. It’s not really doing much as far as protecting the deck, which was its original intent. There’s mildew on here, some of the soft grade is worn out. We’re going to be using two products: Benjamin Moore Restore, which is a 316. It is one of the prescribed cleaners in the Arborcoat System. My firm has gone through the certification. And then after that we’re going to go with a 317 wood brightener.
So we’re starting off with the Restore. If you’re using a 5 gallon – an empty 5 gallon bucket, which is what we use – an easy formula is for grade weather wood like this, to use 3.5 gallons of water and 1.5 gallons of Restore, and that’s what we’re going to do right now.
Three and a half gallons of water, one and a half gallons of the Restore. Have a little look-see at our formulation. [applies cleaner and hoses off]
Here’s a close-up of our deck when we started scrubbing, cleaning, and brightening.
We’re about to add the brightener to water. Always recommend first using eye protection when you’re using these chemicals, and also chemical resistant gloves. All of our workmen use that, and I advise that you do the same thing. So, we have about 3.5 gallons and we’re going to add the brightener.
We have our brightener solution mixed up right here. We’ve cleaned up with the Restore all the way up to this point right here. As you can tell the substrate is still wet. Even though we’ve hosed it off, there’s still some of this cleaner residue on there, the Restore cleaner residue. That’s why we want to use the brightener. [applies brightener and hoses it off]
Unfortunately we have high contrast lighting, so I can’t show this deck like I want to. This is after the brightening, and you can tell because I kept the camera in the same spot that it is a lot brighter than it was before, and it will be quite a bit different once it dries.
