Deck Refinishing in Great Falls, VA

Great Falls has more Brazilian hardwood decking per house than anywhere else we work. Ipe and Cumaru are dense enough to sink in water and oily enough to reject ordinary deck products, and they are unforgiving of the wrong approach.

What we find:

• A film-forming stain has been applied. It sat on top, never penetrated, and is peeling off in sheets.
• Nothing has ever been applied and the deck has silvered to gray. That is cosmetic rather than structural, and it is recoverable, but it takes a proper strip and brighten to bring the color back.
• The deck was oiled without being washed first, sealing mildew and tannin under the finish.

The sequence that works is clean, brighten, dry properly, then a hardwood-specific penetrating oil worked in with the excess wiped off. Excess oil left sitting on Ipe stays tacky and collects dirt for months. If someone has already put a solid stain on hardwood, that is a stripping job before it is a refinishing job, and it is slow. We say so before quoting rather than discovering it on day two.

Houses on the slopes toward Difficult Run and Nichols Run often sit two full stories off the ground at the back, stepping down in levels with a screened porch off one of them.

That changes the staging. A deck twenty feet up on a slope is not the same job as one off a walkout, and the rails, the skirt and the underside all have to be reached properly rather than sprayed from below and called done. We build proper access for it.

Screened porches are effectively interior-grade work happening outdoors. The ceiling, the beams and the screen frames want a different product and a far better cut line than the deck floor does, and because they are protected they last much longer. We price those separately rather than folding everything into one square foot number.

Many properties out here are on private well and septic rather than public water and sewer, and that is a real constraint on deck work that most companies never think about.

Washing a large deck uses a lot of water. If it is coming out of your well we talk about draw rate first and stage the wash rather than running continuously and pulling the pressure down. On marginal wells we bring water in.

The septic side matters just as much. Wash water runs downhill, and a saturated drain field is an expensive problem. Before we start we ask where the field is, and the reserve field too, because people forget that one exists, and we route runoff away from both.

Pollen season runs from late March into May across Northern Virginia, and Great Falls, with this much tree cover, takes it worse than most of the towns we work in. Stain applied over a pollen film does not bond properly.

If we are refinishing in spring we wash close to the stain day rather than a week ahead, and we watch for a genuinely clear window instead of booking blind. Late May into June is usually the best stretch here. September works well too, with the caveat that a shaded deck needs longer to cure than the can suggests once night temperatures start dropping.

If more than about a quarter of your boards have gone soft, refinishing is money spent on a surface problem when you have a material problem. We will say so.

Often the answer is replacing the decking on sound framing, which is a smaller job than people expect because the structure underneath is usually fine. We would rather tell you that than take a deposit for a deck that looks bad again next summer.

Fredy Vargas walks every deck himself before quoting it. The difference between a wash and stain and a full strip and restore is not something anyone can judge from a photograph, and the two are not close in price.