How to Clean and Restore Ipe Exterior Wood Benches and Decks
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All right guys, so we are here in downtown Los Angeles at a long-term commercial client of ours doing some maintenance-slash-refinishing. It’s been a little bit over the recommended maintenance period, so we’re kind of right in the middle of needing a full refinish and a simple maintenance. So we’re going to go ahead and start out by sanding the wood on the horizontal surfaces to remove weathering and the gray oxidation.
All right, here is a little bit of footage of the after portion of the sanding. And as you can see, we’ve exposed beautiful, smooth, raw Ipe wood. There’s no more oxidation, no more contaminants that have landed on the wood, and then just beautiful, smooth, raw Ipe wood.
And of course, in typical Teak Master fashion, we forgot to get the footage of the cleaning and brightening of the wood—but go ahead and take a look at some of our other videos and you guys can see what we do on the cleaning and brightening. Cleaning to remove the dust from the grain, and brightening to eliminate any contaminants and brighten and promote color.
So after we did that, we let it dry, and then we started to apply the penetrating oil-based coating. And the oil-based coatings are still the best. Contrary to popular belief, we don’t use any water-based coatings. The oil-based coatings are the best because they do just that—they penetrate into the wood, highlight the natural grain and color, and it dries matte so it looks very natural.
After it’s been allowed to penetrate to its full potential, we need to wipe off the excess. Take a look at this shot right here and you can see the excess sitting on the surface. We want to remove any excess because it’ll remain sticky and shiny, and it’ll look terrible.
Look at that wood—just absolutely beautiful, stunning Ipe wood. Looks really, really nice. It’ll take a little bit of time to dry to where someone can sit on it. I’d say usually wait about 24 hours. But it really, really comes right back with proper technique. Look at that—just amazing, stunning, refinished and maintained Ipe wood. It just goes to show how resilient and beautiful this really is.
All right guys, so this is a very unique property. It’s gigantic—it takes up a couple city square blocks—and they’ve got tons of unique features just like this bench. And take a look—we did the same process: clean, sand, brighten, and seal. And it’s come back to beautiful, new, smooth Ipe wood just like this deck. It’s really nice. The divider came out beautiful, and it’s ready to go, ready to enjoy in a clean, well-maintained commercial environment.
All right guys, so that concludes our commercial exterior wood refinishing video. And we can handle exterior wood refinishing for commercial projects of any size, just like this.
I wanted to thank you guys so much for tuning in. If you guys like what you saw, go ahead and click that like button. Go ahead and follow us because we’re coming out with more videos just like this on subjects pertaining to exterior wood refinishing in residential and commercial environments.
If you guys have any questions, go ahead and leave comments down below. If you have better technique or anything, leave a comment down below and we’ll be sure to get back to you as soon as we can.
Take a look at teakmaster.com—a full wealth of information on subjects just like this: exterior wood refinishing. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. Tim Gilliam, Teak Master, signing out.
Our Ipe Deck Refinishing Service