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Semitransparent Stain: Tips for Wood Cedar Shingles with a Trusted House Painter

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Paul: I’m Paul from Trusted House Painter. I’m here with Clay from Poised Painting and we’re staining these shingles with semi-transparent stain. Let’s go see what he’s doing. So, Clay, what’s going on?

Clay: Just getting our first coat on everything here. We came in a couple of days ago and did a wash of the exterior, and washed and did a scrub of the cedar shingles to really get, as you can see, some of the loose and flaking stain off of it. And we haven’t done any sanding on these. With these cedar shingles, what I find is you really want to keep the wood fibers and try to continue staining them. Because once you sand and then they start to get thin and it actually messes with the wood grain, so stains start to absorb differently between one shingle and another. So this is sort of the perfect time. We can come in, we can do a whole scrub, and then we can leave the wood fibers. If you leave it any longer, you can notice this one is sort of starting to bow, so when they get really dried out, they sort of curve. And then they end up when you try to pin him down they snap. So, just one here that’s sort of starting to curve. Everything else is in great shape. Perfect time for us to come in and and preserve this wood and protect it for the long run.

Paul: What kind of product are you using?

Clay: This is the Wood Pride Oil Acrylic Semi-transparent Stain from Dulux

Paul: We got good results with it, or what?

Clay: Yeah. We were here last year to do the shingles on the south side and yeah, the clients were really happy with the look of the product because they still wanted to have a little bit of the wood grain showing through. But then wanted to have the color to it as well, so, they’re getting the best of both worlds there. The protection and the wood look.

Paul: Any other tips you’d give for this kind of… How many brushes you gonna go through on this job?

Clay: I’ve got, probably, four days of staining and I’ve got more brushes. Probably a couple for me, a couple for you. As you can see the best the best way to work the product is to just gush it in and gush it in. Get a lot on and sort of try and drive it into the wood fibre. So as you can see you the tip of the brush it gets banged up really bad.

Paul: And you’ve got the tape here? 

Clay: Yeah. It’s quite watery because it is a penetrating stain. So with that being said, it tends to drip quite a bit. And you can sort of see already some of the splatter going on. So there’s the metal flashing here, and we could clean it up, but as long as it’s not on there, that’s sort of the end result we need so we can either protect it and not get it on, or we can leave it and have to clean up afterwards. So, it just looks a lot better when you’re protecting instead of fixing a problem that’s happened, so throw some tape on and keep everything nice and tidy. And then up here you can see, we’re all over the trim. Our contract here is to do the siding and do the trim. So, we’ll stain everything here. This is quite messy. And then the paint here is a lot easier to control because it’s got a little bit more thickness to it. So, here we’ll paint two coats and make it really nice and clean edges, but by the time, we’re all done. 

Paul: Remember to catch your drips, because there’s lots of drips. 

Clay: Yeah, always with stain, especially with all these angles, you can see here how the stain is running down in between, it catches. So you always sort of got to keep an eye backwards on what you’ve already done to make sure that any of those grips you get before they solidify. 

Paul: All right. Thanks, Clay. Keep up the good work.

Clay: Yeah, thank you.

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