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Deck Refinishing in Reston, VA
In most towns the only question about a deck stain is which color you like. In Reston the cluster standard and the Design Review Board get a say first, and that is the part homeowners find out about late.
Your stain color goes through Design Review
Exterior change on Reston Association property goes to the Design Review Board, and refinishing a deck in a different color counts. People assume a deck is too small to matter. It is not, particularly when it faces a glade path and half the neighborhood walks past the back of it.
The application wants more than a color name. A written description of the work, photographs of what is there now, material or color samples rather than a description of them, and a timeline, because approved work has to begin within six months and finish within eighteen. It also asks for signatures from owners within view of the house, which is awareness rather than consent.
Staying inside your cluster's established standard usually lets the application be handled at staff level instead of waiting for a Board hearing. Reston Association Covenants Administration is on 703-435-6530. Call before you pick a color. We brush real samples on offcuts of your own decking so you submit the actual color on the actual wood.
Cluster standards differ, and yours has been revised
There are roughly 134 cluster associations here and around thirty condominium associations on top of that. Chestnut Ridge, Bentana Woods, the Moorings, Newport Shores, Southgate Square, the Hamlet: each one has its own written design standard, and some of them tie the palette to one manufacturer's color set.
Two things go wrong. The homeowner works from the copy of the standard that came in the closing packet years ago, which has since been revised. Or the homeowner matches the deck next door by eye, when that deck has faded three shades or was never approved in the first place.
We work from the current standard and the manufacturer code, and where the standard is silent on decks we get it confirmed in writing rather than inventing a rule. Stain in the wrong color is not a repaint, it is a strip.
Decks built out over the glades
Reston lots fall away towards the stream valleys. That means a lot of decks here are not sitting on a lawn, they are built out over a slope, with the far posts a full story or more off the ground and the underside hanging over ground that stays wet. Three things change:
- Access. The outer rim joist, the underside of the boards and the outside face of the rails are the surfaces nobody reaches with a brush from the deck. We stage for them properly rather than spraying up from below and calling it coated.
- Drying. A deck over damp ground takes moisture from underneath the whole time, so the top can feel dry while the board still carries water through its thickness.
- Runoff. Wash water off a deck above a glade goes straight down the slope towards a stream valley. We contain and direct it instead of letting it run.
Original 1960s and 70s decks, and what is left of them
Reston started in 1964, and a good number of decks on the older clusters around Lake Anne, Waterview and Hickory are original or a single replacement from the eighties. Fifty year old pressure-treated pine under permanent tree cover does not behave like a deck from 2015.
What we find on these: boards cupped hard enough to hold standing water along the whole length, original steel fasteners that have bled black stains down through the wood, and stair stringers soft at the bottom where they meet damp ground. The railings are usually the soundest part of the deck, because they shed water and nobody walks on them.
The black around the fasteners is tannin reacting with metal, not dirt. Cleaning and brightening lifts most weathered gray, but deep fastener staining on a fifty year old board does not always come out, and we say so before you pay for the wash.
Why solid stain is the wrong instinct in a shaded cluster
Reston siding is often finished in solid-body stain, and it works well there, so people reach for the same product on the deck. On vertical cedar a solid stain wears thin. On a horizontal walking surface under trees it forms a film with water sitting on top of it and moisture pushing up from below, and it lets go in sheets inside a couple of seasons.
We push shaded Reston decks towards a penetrating semi-transparent stain or an oil that wears rather than peels. A penetrating finish comes back with a wash and a coat. A failed film comes back with a strip. If your cluster standard names a color only available as a solid we will do it, and we will tell you what the recoat cycle looks like first.
We wash at low pressure with a percarbonate cleaner and dwell time. Under this much canopy the surface fiber is already soft, and a high pressure tip does not clean it, it furrows it.
Ipe and Cumaru, which turn up here more than most towns
A lot of Reston homeowners replaced tired pressure-treated boards with Brazilian hardwood rather than rebuilding the whole structure. So there are more Ipe and Cumaru decks per street here than almost anywhere we work, often on original 1970s framing.
Hardwood is dense and oily and rejects anything film-forming. The usual call is a deck where an ordinary stain never penetrated and is now flaking off. That is a strip before it is a refinish, and stripping Ipe is slow. What works is clean, brighten, dry through, then a hardwood penetrating oil applied thin with the excess wiped back. Oil left standing on Ipe stays tacky for months. Under Reston shade it needs refreshing sooner than the label suggests.
Doing a whole cluster row at once
In the townhouse and patio-home clusters the decks are built the same way, the same year, and they fail the same year. We are happy to work with a cluster board or a group of neighbors on several decks in one visit.
It costs less per house than everyone booking separately, it means one Design Review conversation rather than six, and the shared privacy screens between units only look right if both sides were done at once with the same product.
What we will tell you not to do
If a quarter or more of your boards have gone soft underfoot, refinishing is money spent on a surface problem when what you have is a material problem. On a Reston deck the framing is often sound even when the decking is finished, so replacing boards on the existing structure is a smaller job than people fear.
We do not stain wet wood to hit a date, and after a wash on a shaded deck over a glade that is often two days or more. We will not coat over a peeling solid stain either, because you get the same peel in a new color.
Fredy Vargas walks every deck himself before quoting. Virginia contractor license 2705098145. Call 703-869-0593.
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