I recently had some decking put down in our back garden. It is a light coloured European softwood, and was in its raw state a kind of pine colour/shade. The men who laid it recommended that I treat it soon-ish, which I dutifully did a few weeks later. I chose a product especially touted as being good for staining and protecting decking, which advertised itself as a ‘light oak’ colour.
‘Cool!’, I thought, light oak is nice.
It is ghastly; it looks like shit, figuratively and literally. It is a horrible shade of shit-brown, and has somehow managed to smother out much of the original wood’s lines and features.
No idea what happened there. Maybe I used too much, maybe the product I used was rubbish. Doesn’t really matter now - the question is what, if anything, I can do to fix it. Sanding would be out of the question (even if I had a big enough power-sander, which I don’t, the decking has parallel grooves in it), so I guess I am stuck with a) hoping that somehow it gets better, b) waiting to get used to it or c) painting over it with (presumably) a darker shade.
If you have a spare piece of the decking, coat it with the same material. Let it dry, then try brushing it with mineral spirits and soaking it up with a rag to see if it helps. Otherwise, you’re probably going to have to live with it.
Do you have any other wood lying around? Try putting some stain on it and see if it looks bad. Try on other wood other than the decking wood. It could be that the stain is messed up, or it could be that the stain reacted badly with something in the deck wood.
How did you apply the stain? Typically, stain is applied, allowed to soak for a certain amount of time, and then wiped off. If it wasn’t wiped off, the residue may have congealed.
But regardless, it’s going to be tough to reverse the problem. Even you sanded, the stain has penetrated into the wood. You’d end up with spots and blotchy patches.
You may want to pose this question on a board more dedicated to home improvement topics. They will be more likely to have run into this issue and have experience on remedies which helped. Also contact the manufacturer, as they may have an idea of what happened.
Heh. At first I was going to :rolleyes: over your telling the OP that You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Then I realized Paint It Black worked better.
