We are taking advantage of a few sunny days – and the short period between blackberry harvest and grape harvest – to work on our barn boards. We have over 3600 board feet of white pine lumber, which we plan to use for refinishing the outside of the barn with a board and batten look.
The lumber was cut back in January, and since then has been drying out nicely. The boards are definitely ready to be stained – but it took us a while to choose the type of stain and the color.
We finally selected a Sikkens product, called ProLuxe, which is a translucent, water repellent wood finish that is good for siding and log homes. The color we eventually decided on is a simple natural oak, the lightest of the sample shades in the picture above.
We are staining both sides and all the edges of each board – and each board is 16 ft long….so this is a very slow process. It took a full day for one person to stain 4 layers of boards from our pile of 27 layers. We used extra fence posts as supports for the drying boards – they were taking up the entire area in front of the barn.
