Project Stain Fence COMPLETE!

Okay so we have literally been itching to get this fence taken care of since we moved in just over a year ago. It was old and weathered looking which can be nice but not in this case it just looked like it had seen many better years. We debated for a long time about what exactly to do with it…paint or stain? We were worried that because the wood had remained unprotected for so long that it would take the stain unevenly so we were initially leaning towards paint. So we went through a list of colors that we could potentially paint it. We have a yellowish-beige house, white trim and a brown roof. So what color do you choose? We were thinking white but white gets sooo dirty and there's no way we were going to spend all this time and money painting the fence to have it look like a mud pit when it rains. Sooo we then considered black….hmm….how often have you seen a black picket fence? I've seen plenty of wrought iron ones but not wood. We currently have no black on our house so it didn't make a lot of sense. We love black but a black fence would make too much of a statement…not sure a good one. So we went back to our original idea, let's stain it! We had already bought some stain last year in our attempt to stain the deck….we tried it and were pleasantly surprised that it turned out to be beautiful. At some point we realized we needed to just make a decision and stick with it. So here's our beautiful "new" fence…

So here were our steps:

1) Clean the fence (we used this pressure washer)

2) Let the fence dry thoroughly (we gave it a few days)

3) Find a couple sunny (not-so-windy) days to stain

We used this Semi-transparent Cabot stain in Cordovan Brown and for the most part it worked pretty well. Some areas of the wood as you may or may not be able to tell took to the stain differently but we weren't expecting perfection. 

So here's a cost breakdown:
- Pressure Washer (already owned)
- Paint Sprayer (already owned)
- Cabot Stain (11 gallons) ~$400 ** please note we do have a pretty large fence and this includes two coats on both sides. We probably could have saved more with a cheaper stain as well as hand brushing which was not an option as far as I was concerned!
 Total: $400

If you want to attempt staining or painting your fence with a paint sprayer I would consider checking out this video that we found helpful. Also be aware you will get some overspray so prepare for that but it took us about 1.5 hours to do each side one coat. We let it dry overnight and did another coat on each side the next day. So it took us about 3 hours total. Not too bad considering how long hand painting would have been (ouch)!

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