Project #27.518: Painting the fence

A couple of weeks ago, I realized my fence needed some help. Actually I am not sure if the fence was stained, painted or what product they used before, but whatever it was, it looked in bad shape. The fence had obvious signs of "paint" peeling away and some of the fence boards were already naked so before the situation got worse I decided to take action.

The first thing I did is a little research to figure out what product I needed. Home Depot provided all the information via one of these touch-screen kiosks in the paint department. According to the guy in the video, the best protection for wood is a fence/deck stain. I'll take his word for granted. There are three different stains, transparent, semi-transparent and solid, being the latter the one that provides the better protection (the label claims 25 years warranty on fences). The fence was already "painted" so I needed to hide the defects of that paint job like paint dripping marks and such. Add to this that I don't want to repeat this work again in two or three years. The result is that I went for the "solid stain": maximum durability and homogeneous color.

As always, my wife chose the color: Brick.

This is the stain that we chose

I already had some of the painting supplies from when I painted the house, so I only needed some rollers, this time I went for quality and chose the Purdy which are MADE IN USA :)

Here is the procedure I followed for staining the fence.

Preparation

• If your fence is full of spiderwebs, bird nests, and such, use a broom to remove these.
• Spray the fence with water, using a garden hose or water sprayer.
• Then wipe it off using a cloth. This will remove all dirt.
• Once dry, it's ready for the stain.

Here I am spraying the fence

Staining

• I applied the stain with the roller horizontally, when trying to do this vertically I noticed some boards were out of alignment so it was easier to do it horizontally.
• Stained around 10 to 15 boards, then waited to dry and repeated with a second coat.
• Then used a 2" paint brush to finish the spots where the roller didn't work, like top and sides of the boards.

Painting the fence horizontally

I am still trying to figure out how to do the other side of the fence, since it's on the neighbor's property.

And this is the result:

Fence is ready to take abuse from San Diego sun