Peeling Deck Sanded & Refinished in Scarborough

The deck: a good layout under a failing finish

This Scarborough backyard deck has more going on than most: a wide run of stairs down to the interlock patio, railings on both sides, a built-in bench and a tall lattice privacy screen with a small pergola header. It is a well-built deck. The problem was the finish. The previous solid stain had worn through on every stair tread and across the walking path, the colour had gone patchy and the bare patches were starting to grey. The homeowners wanted the deck to look finished again, in one even colour, and they did not want to be back in the same spot in two years.

Why the old solid stain failed

A solid stain is only as good as what it is applied over. This one had been put on top of an earlier coating without the old finish being removed, so it bonded to a layer that was already letting go. On high-wear surfaces — stair treads and the path from the door — it wore through first, and once water got under the edges it lifted. That is the pattern we see on most deck restoration jobs in Toronto: the product gets blamed when the preparation was the problem.

Sanded to perfection: no trace of the old stain

We sanded the entire deck back to bare wood: the floor, every stair tread and riser, the railings, the bench and the posts. The during photo shows what that means in practice — clean, pale wood with no evidence of the previous peeling stain anywhere, not in the grain, not in the corners, not on the stair edges where coatings usually hang on. It is slow work on a deck with this much trim, but it is the whole job. Stain applied to a surface like this bonds to wood, not to old paint, and that is what decides whether it lasts.

Why we used a solid stain again

After sanding, the owners had a choice. A penetrating oil stain would have shown the grain, but on an older pressure-treated deck with mixed boards, stair stringers and a lot of lattice, the grain was not the point — a clean, uniform colour was. So we used a Sherwin-Williams solid-colour deck stain in a warm cedar tone. Applied to properly sanded, dry wood, a quality solid stain is a durable, long-lasting finish; the failures people associate with it almost always come from recoating over an old film. We coated the deck floor, stairs, railings, bench, lattice panels and the pergola header so the whole structure reads as one piece.

The result

From worn-through, patchy stairs to a deck that looks freshly built: an even, warm colour across the floor, the wide staircase, the railings and the privacy screen, with the lattice reading as a designed feature instead of weathered trim. Maintenance from here is a wash and a maintenance coat when it dulls, with no stripping.

Deck staining and restoration in Scarborough and East Toronto

UCO Construction Group restores and stains decks, stairs, fences and privacy screens across Scarborough, East York, the Beaches, Pickering, Ajax and the rest of the GTA. If your solid stain is peeling, we can sand it off completely and refinish in either a penetrating oil or a solid colour — see our deck staining and restoration service, or if the boards themselves are gone, our deck construction page. Get in touch for a free on-site estimate.