Deck Painting & staining across Attleboro, Massachusetts.

A deck floor is flat, so snow melts on it slowly, rain pools in the board gaps, and summer sun hits it straight on. That combination wears out a stain far faster than the same product on a wall. The practical goal is a finish you can recoat on a schedule, not one that looks perfect for a season and then peels in sheets.

Single-family detached houses hold 54.4% of the city's housing units and attached single-family homes, such as townhouses, add 6.6%. Owners of a detached house decide on their own deck; in an attached development the association may set the color and timing, which our condo painting page covers.

Brooks, wetlands and slow-drying boards

Attleboro is one of the towns in the Ten Mile River watershed, which covers about 54 square miles and takes in the Bungay River and Sevenmile Brook. If your yard slopes toward a brook, a wetland or a wooded edge, the deck may stay damp for long stretches. Wet wood grows mildew and algae, and stain applied over damp boards does not soak in.

On a deck like that, the order of work matters: clean to kill the growth, let the boards dry until water soaks in instead of beading, then apply a stain that contains a mildewcide. Rinse water from cleaners and strippers should be kept out of storm drains and away from plantings and any nearby wetland.

Older pressure-treated lumber

Houses built from 1980 through 1999 make up 23.8% of the stock. Decks from those years, if the original boards are still in place, may be CCA-treated lumber, the arsenic-based preservative that the EPA says manufacturers stopped making for homeowner uses in December 2003. The EPA advises goggles and a dust mask when cutting it and warns against burning it at home.

For a stain job, that means sanding is kept light and dust is collected rather than blown around the yard, and any boards that get replaced go out with the trash rather than into a fire pit. Boards that are split, cupped badly or soft near the posts are a carpentry fix before any finish goes on.

Choosing how much the stain hides

Moving toward more opacity is easy; moving back means stripping. Our paint vs. stain comparison goes through the trade-offs.

• Clear or toner: shows all the grain, but UV turns the wood gray quickly and recoats come often
• Semi-transparent: tints the wood while the grain still reads; wears gradually and recoats without stripping
• Solid stain: covers like thin paint and hides mismatched boards, but can peel on floors and is hard to reverse
• Deck paint or resurfacer: the most coverage; needs scraping where it fails

Painted porch floors on pre-war houses

About 24.1% of units date to 1939 or earlier. Where an older house has a covered porch with a painted tongue-and-groove floor, the sensible maintenance is more paint, using a porch-and-floor enamel, not a switch to stain. Under the current coat there may be decades of earlier paint, including lead paint from before 1978, so scraping is done with containment described on our lead-safe painting page. Posts, rails and ceilings on those porches are part of the house trim; see exterior painting.