Leaderboard

Max, welcome to TGS. If I understand correctly, your deck is just a week old. Right? When you say "roofed", it has a ceiling, arbor or awning over the deck. Right? Your karcher is enough to clean and prep the deck as a DIYer, but, why, it is brand new? There should be no prep required if wood is brand new. However I would suggest waiting for the wood to acclimate to it's new environment a while. That's just my take on it. Others may say different. Personally I would wait until next spring to treat the deck since it is brand new. The stain will adhere much better. IMO. A simple per carb cleaning in the spring is all you will need to prep the deck. Then stain it. I have used a wagner paint crew many yrs. ago and it worked fine for what I needed to spray. I also ran a longer supply tube from the wagner directly into the stain jug. The container on the wag was way too small and requires refill too often to suit me. Many contractors here swear by the AC stain. You can contact some of the suppliers here on this forum and request some samples to test, just to be sure of the product you want to use. Sidenote: you will want to dial down your psi on the Karcher to about 800 psi so no damage occurs to the wood. again.... welcome to TGS. another sidenote: this is the first year I have missed the balloon fest in ABQ. Man, what an awesome event. So much fun. esp. at night with the burnoff displays. So freaking cooooooool.

Max, I'll second what Adrian said concerning waiting to stain. Most PT lumber is too "green" to accept stain properly, and many times a finish fails prematurely. If you have intense sun, as you mentioned, I would recommend letting nature take its course and dry the wood a bit.

I agree with almost everything Adrian said, with one exception. If you use a penetrating stain like Readyseal or Woodrich Timber Oil, you can clean and stain now, get a light coat in, and help the wood acclimate slower, helping to reduce the cracking from a quick dry down. Then, in the spring, say around early May, soap the deck and lightly rinse, and get the second coat into it, building up the protection. Max, in my experience, if you have the time, you are in a position to have a showpiece deck by doing what most homeowners are not willing to do, and that is to apply multiple coats of a parafinnic oil stain a few months apart, and build up the oil in the wood. Trying to "lock it in" results in stripping down the road 90% of the time in my opinion.

+1...what he said. Beth

I've been using Ready Seal for 6 years now and it's definetly our favorite sealer. Why did I choose Ready Seal? I won't risk my companies reputation on new products that don't have a history of use and maintenance in my area. I won't use products that the manufacturer is constantly making changes to without notifying me. I won't use products that can be bought in a hardware store. I won't use surface coating products.