Creating Boundaries: The Resurrection

Just when you thought the fence was a done deal, it's come back to haunt Glam Granola. You see, we couldn't convince Ryan's dad to help us plaster this weekend (I scared him with all the posts about how labor intensive it is I have no idea why), but he convinced us to stain our fence so that it doesn't turn grey or black.

You can see it was already starting to lose its reddish glow.

But thanks to about three hours of work, the fence is radiant again.

It was a team effort to get to this point; I cut in and painted the top, while Ryan and his dad came up with this system to paint the bottom of the fence. Ryan's dad rolled the stain on, and Ryan used a 3" brush to back-brush what his dad had rolled, filling in any gaps as he went (which he's doing above).

In fact, their system was so successful that I adopted it for the top of the fence. I used this mini roller we have hanging around to roll on the stain, and then I back-brushed it before it could dry.

I would highly recommend investing in one of these baby rollers! Rolling and back-brushing went much faster than brushing everything in, especially since the redwood soaks up the stain pretty quickly, thus you have to use a lot more stain than you do paint (which I am much more familiar with).

For those of you who want to the details, we used Behr Premium Wood-Toned Deck, Fence, and Siding Weatherproofing Wood Finish in Cedar Naturaltone in No. 501 to stain and protect the redwood.

We chose Cedar Naturaltone instead of the Redwood Naturaltone because we thought the yellow of the cedar would still allow the natural red of the wood to shine through without making it look exaggerated or unnatural, the way the Redwood Naturaltone did in the store's mock up.

We got a 5 gallon bucket of stain, and it only took about half of the bucket to do the whole fence, which is good because now we have some left over for when we inevitably have to re-stain it, which hopefully won't be for a couple of years. And the best part, in my opinion, was that it's latex based instead of oil based, which means that you can use your good rollers and brushes without fear of ruining them or gumming them up.

Compared to plastering, staining the fence wasn't bad at all. It's nice to start and finish a project in one day, and we even got to be outside soaking up the summer fog we're famous for in these parts.

We accomplished another backyard feat this weekend as well that I'll be gabbing about tomorrow. Hint: you can see it in the background of one of the pics in this post...

By the way, if your looking for the backstory on the fence, you can read all about it here, here, and here.