Deck Painting & staining for Brookline, MA homeowners.

Outdoor space in Brookline comes in very different sizes. The Chestnut Hill area survey describes single-family houses on lots from one-third of an acre to more than two acres, while the 2015 study for the Crowninshield district, near the Boston line on Commonwealth Avenue, lists an average lot of about 6,700 square feet with streets lined by now-mature trees. Detached single-family houses are 18.3% of the town's housing units, and another 25.7% of units are in two- to four-unit buildings, where the outdoor space a household uses may be a porch or a set of back stairs rather than a freestanding deck.

That range means two separate jobs travel under the same name. A wood deck on a newer addition usually takes a penetrating stain. A porch on an older house usually has painted floorboards, painted rails and turned balusters, and it needs paint, not stain.

Stain or paint: matching the finish to the wood

Pressure-treated pine and cedar decks do best with a penetrating stain that soaks in and wears away gradually rather than peeling. Transparent and semi-transparent stains show the grain and need recoating more often; solid-color stains hide more and last longer on vertical parts, but on walking surfaces they can wear through in traffic paths and start to flake.

Porch floors are a different system. Once boards have been painted, stain can't penetrate them, so they stay painted with a porch-and-floor enamel. Rails, spindles and lattice take an exterior trim paint, applied by brush to get into the turnings.

• Deck cleaning and brightening before stain
• Penetrating or solid stain for boards, rails and stairs
• Porch floor enamel over scraped and primed boards
• Brushed paint on balusters, posts and lattice

Shade, leaves and drying time

Under a mature tree canopy, wood stays damp longer after rain, leaves leave tannin marks, and mildew finds a home in the gaps between boards. Before staining, the surface needs a deck cleaner to lift mildew and gray fibers, a rinse at moderate pressure (high pressure tears up soft pine), and enough dry weather for the moisture content to drop. A shaded deck may need extra drying days that a sunny one doesn't.

Cleaning out the gaps between boards and keeping leaves swept off between coats extends the life of whatever finish goes on.

Porches on older and historic houses

Porches are among the details Brookline's preservation surveys pay attention to. The 1985 nomination for the Graffam Development describes large porches with spool-and-spindle balusters on its 1890s houses, and the Harvard Avenue report cites the removal of a porch as part of what heavily altered one c.1855 house. In a Local Historic District, most exterior modifications go to the Town for review, so rebuilding a railing to a new design or swapping wood steps for another material should start with a call to Preservation staff. Whether a straight repaint in the same color needs anything is worth asking at the same time.

Porch paint on a pre-1978 house may contain lead. Scraping more than 20 square feet of it is regulated under EPA and Massachusetts rules, and it has to be done lead-safe, with sheeting below and careful cleanup of chips from the yard. Our lead-safe painting page explains the requirements, and the Brookline exterior painting page covers district review in more depth.

Shared porches and stairs

In a converted two- or three-unit building, a back porch or stair may be a common element owned by the association rather than any single unit. Check the condo documents before choosing a color or hiring anyone, and see the Brookline condo painting page for how boards handle shared work. Properties around Brookline Hills, Washington Square and elsewhere in town can be seen on a free on-site visit.