How to Repaint a Peeling Deck

LESLIE: Bill in Illinois, you’ve got The Money Pit. How can we help you today?

BILL: We put a deck on the back of our house. It was with pretreated wood. Stained it with deck and – transparent deck stain. Turned out the color was not what my wife expected. We tolerated it for a few months and then she said, “I don’t like this. So, let’s paint it or let’s do something.” So we went back to the place where we got the paint.

And they gave us a paint that was not a real pink paint but he said it will go ahead and just cover that blue. So I said, “OK,” painted it. And it was satisfactory and then decided more – decided to put a rug out on half of it so that it would match the paint in the house and so forth. So, left this for a year and sure enough, when you pull the rug up, the paint – some of the paint peeled off, which I understand because of the moisture in that. But other parts of the deck are starting to peel off now. And I’m wondering what I should do to go and repaint it or rough the – sand the deck down or something. But it won’t work.

TOM: Well, here’s the thing: you can’t put good paint over bad paint.

BILL: Right.

TOM: So, if the paint layer is separating and delaminating, you have to strip it. So you absolutely, positively have to strip this deck with a good-quality wood stripper. Get it down to the wood and then go back up from there.

I would recommend that you not paint but use solid-color stain next time. That’s going to give you long-term protection of the deck. And it’s not the kind of material that will generally peel, either. So I would strip it down and then use a solid-color stain to get to the color that you want it to be. OK?