Refinishing Wood coated with Olympic Elite Woodland Oil: Yet another tangent,

In the last blog, I was able to continue stuccoing the house.   However, with 60% of the house stuccoed I was now ready to tackle the stuccoing in the cedar porch area.  But as I looked at the cedar porch it was obvious that it needed some touch up.  In the sun exposed areas the finish was showing light weathered look due to UV exposure and even a little graying.  It certainly did not have its original luster (see the former blog on the cedar porch at this link).  But in the sun covered shadowy areas it was still ok.   It actually was almost two years ago when I constructed the porch and put Olympic Elite Woodland oil on it.

Since applying the oil to the cedar usually gets oil on everything, including the walls and the cement pad,  I decided not to subject the new wall stucco to touch the cedar up in the areas that needed it before I had applied the stucco (This would be a double tangent for me as it puts off the stucco job which also puts off the paver driveway job).  Of course even when the new stucco is on the wall eventually I will have to re-coat the entire cedar porch with oil.

To determine if the Olympic elite woodland oil is ready to be reapplied , the manufacturer recommend throwing water on it.  Since it beaded up and didn't absorb the water, I could not refinish it according to the manufacturer.  So I decided to use the Olympic deck wash  and brightener on the weathered areas.   If you look at the MSDS you will find that wash has Ethanedioic and Phosphoric acid.  in it.  To apply the wash I used a sprayer .  The directions say to to wet the wood and apply the wash and wait 20 minutes and scrub with a nylon brush and then wash it off.  However, to my surprise the wood soaked the wash up within five minutes.  This made me realize the cedar porch was ready to take the woodland oil and my preliminary water test had been misleading

I used the wash on the ledger, the main beam, posts and outer rafters.  It did not seem to really be that great at cleaning the wood, but combined  with the pressure washer the wood did get clean.  Since the directions mentioned staining the wood after using the wash, I changed my course of action and proceeded to refinishing the washed wood with the oil.

First I covered up the walls and cement pad with plastic and then applied the oil to the cedar.   It went on very nice and looks great.  I decided the areas that are in the shadows and less weathered will be  refinished next year.

Below is a picture of some of the weathered wood although this is not the worst area.

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The refinished wood looks like this.

That's all for now,

Happy Building.

The Dr.