Home Improvement Hack – Staining Your Fence

Welcome to my very first blog post! I’m going to be keeping these short, sweet, and relevant.

Today I’m going to talk about a pain-in-the-butt household job that I had been putting off for a couple months. Staining my fence!

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been looking at your fence knowing that you need to get out there  and get a coat of stain on it before the rain makes a comeback. The problem? This job sucks! It takes a long time, it’s messy, it’s just an all around no-fun project. I was grumbling to my father-in-law about needing to get some stain on our new fence, and he gave me a great pro-tip that is worth sharing!

He recommended using a cheap $15 garden sprayer that you can pump and pressurize to apply the stain. The same kind of sprayer you may have used before to spray weed killer. Moving panel by panel, spray on the stain, quickly wipe over the panel with a large stain brush to make sure there are no drips and the boards are adequately coated, and then move on to the next panel. Tip- Don’t let your stain brush get too saturated. Wipe the excess stain that the brush is holding on to the next panel you will be spraying. You’d like the brush to be as dry as possible before brushing down each panel.

I will post some photos below to show what we used, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions about the job! This made staining our fence extremely easy and efficient. We were able to knock the entire job out in less than 4 hours. Not bad considering we had a lot of fence to stain!

Disclaimer: We used your typical semi transparent oil based stain. If you are using a thicker paint like stain, I doubt this particular sprayer would work…but you could always go to Hardware Sales here in Bellingham and rent a sprayer that would do the job. Since you are spraying, you also need to be conscious of overspray around your house, vehicles, garden etc. I just held up some cardboard when spraying by the house to catch the overspray, wiped off any that I missed with a damp cloth,  and I laid plastic drop cloths over our garden beds while I was spraying next to them.  Lastly, wear a mask! You don’t want to be breathing this stuff in!

Do you have any tips and tricks for household work that you have run across that were game changers? Tell me about them!