Deck Painting & staining across Salem, Massachusetts.

Outdoor wood around a Salem house tends to be one of two kinds. One is a stained deck of pressure-treated or cedar boards. The other is a painted wood porch: tongue-and-groove floor boards, turned balusters, a beadboard ceiling and steps down to the walk, the kind found on older houses, and 10,951 of the city's housing units date from 1939 or earlier. The two need different products and different prep, and mixing them up is how a deck ends up peeling a year after it was coated.

Ownership shapes who decides. Census counts show 5,145 single-family detached houses and 1,320 attached ones in Salem, about 30% of all units, and 49.7% of occupied homes are lived in by their owners. In a two- to four-unit building, which holds 38.0% of the city's units, a shared back porch or deck may need agreement among owners before work starts.

Stain on decks, paint on porches

A penetrating or semi-transparent stain soaks into deck boards and wears away gradually, so the next round is mostly washing and reapplying. Solid stain and porch enamel form a film that hides the wood but must be scraped or stripped when it fails. On a newly built pressure-treated deck, the lumber needs to dry before any stain will absorb. Our paint vs. stain comparison for decks goes into the trade-offs.

• Deck boards, stair treads, stringers and skirting
• Railings, balusters, newels and post caps
• Painted porch floors, steps, columns and ceilings
• Pergolas and fence sections attached to the deck

Porch paint, lead and the removal rules

A porch on a prewar house may carry many coats, and with 76.4% of Salem units built before 1980, the lower layers can contain lead. Porch floors and stair treads wear down under foot traffic, which is how old paint turns into dust and chips in a yard. Containment on the ground, wet scraping and full cleanup are part of the job; see our lead-safe painting page.

The Salem Historical Commission's guidelines also quote local health rules on removal: a Health Department permit before any paint removal process, no electric sanding on exterior surfaces, and no abrasive blasting without a Board of Health variance. That wording covers any paint removal process, so check the permit with the Health Department before scraping or stripping begins.

Porch colors inside the historic districts

In the McIntire, Derby Street, Lafayette Street and Washington Square districts, the Commission's guidelines list porches among the elements whose paint color needs a Certificate of Appropriateness when visible from a public way. A front porch repainted in its current color is maintenance. A new floor gray, or switching a painted rail to stain, is a change worth asking about before buying product. The guidelines do accept opaque stain as an alternative to paint when the surface is properly prepared.

Water, wind and the drying window

Salem sits on its harbor, and properties near open water such as Salem Willows, a waterfront park on Salem Neck since 1858, can see more wind than a deck tucked behind a house farther inland. Wind-driven rain and morning dew keep boards wet longer, which is when mildew grows and when stain can't go on. Coating needs dry wood and mild weather with no rain through the product's cure, which in Massachusetts means late spring into early fall. Our article on deck stain through a New England winter explains the freeze-thaw cycle a finish has to survive.