How to Refinish an Exterior Red Wood Gate

Now back to the other side—it’s atrocious. It’s blistering and peeling. It’s gone way past the maintenance period, and now it’s in need of a full refinish. So what we start off by doing is we’re taping off and protecting everything that we’re working around. The client did not want us to try and remove the wrought iron portion of the gate. A lot of people do not want their items taken apart. In this particular case, that’s why we didn’t take that off. And in many cases, that’s why we don’t take off gutters and half of people’s homes to do the work that we do—because they do not want us to do that and they do not want us to create another problem.

So we go ahead and we’re starting off by applying a chemical stripping agent that’s going to bubble and dissolve the current coating that’s already failing and beginning to blister and peel. That’s just brushed on. We allow it to do its thing, and then we start off by scraping and carefully removing the previous coating.

A lot of people are like, “Can’t you just, you know, get some sandpaper and grind it off?” And, well, I suppose you could do that and spend double the amount of time and not do it the right way. But the right way is to strip it first. You want to get in the cracks and crevices and things like that and make sure that when you’re sanding, you’re taking off minimal amounts of wood.

And when you have an intricate door—this isn’t as intricate as some of the front doors that we do—you can’t just straight sand something with molding or carvings or things like that, because you’re going to remove the attributes.

This is the other side—just more scraping, more stripping. It’s just slow and tedious work. There’s no fast way to do this. It’s just calculated work, and it takes time to do it correctly. So we’re just working. We’ve got the team doing their thing, got lots of guys.

Our total philosophy here is to get in and get out in a timely manner. I know you’ve got that evil, disgusting devil—the blow-and-go finishing pro—that will just dump off one guy, two guys to this gate, and they’ll be camped out at your house for two weeks. That’s not us. Our clients hire us because we’ve got efficient crews of small and large sizes to quickly and efficiently address their needs, get in and get out, and do the great work that we’re known for.

So the next step is doing the sanding. We are sanding to remove the remaining debris that stripping didn’t quite get off and to remove oxidation, weathering, any minor damage that we can get off with some sanding. Sanding is the most important step because, as you can see, it gets everything back down to bare wood and it exposes fresh new wood.

Take a look at that—beautiful, beautiful redwood. It’s just amazing how great it comes back. So we blew off the gate to remove the dust from the grain, and now we’re just doing a quick wipe down to make sure that there’s no dust embedded in the grain. The guys are just wiping everything down, making sure that there’s no dust and that everything’s perfectly clean.

We’ve got everything clean, and now we are doing the staining. Typically, we perform some samples for each and every client to zero in on the color and the tone that they’re going for. This particular client—we did some samples. I don’t unfortunately have the footage of that. I think that’s kind of boring. But you guys get the message. We’ll perform some samples on the actual wood right in front of you so you guys can take a look and see what it’s going to look like.

We’ve got all the stains on the truck, so there’s no guessing, there’s no running back and forth or anything like that to the paint store looking at pieces of paper or a computer screen. We’re ready, and we’re ready for action.

The final step is applying the clear coat, and we use an oil-based clear coat that’s sprayed on. We want to spray it so we get a nice, thick, even, furniture-grade type outcome. For these gates, that is the best way. Imagine camped out like it was 1928 with a paintbrush and some varnish trying to get it on evenly. You’d at best achieve mediocre results. There might be brush marks, drips, things like that.

As you can see here—no drips, no brush marks, just beautiful, fine finishing on the exterior gate here. And it looks stunning. The client’s absolutely happy. No blistering and peeling—all that stuff’s gone. Just beautiful, smooth, brand-new redwood gates.

Thank you guys so much for tuning in to another video addressing exterior wood refinishing concerns. This redwood gate in Lynette, California, has been fully restored. We have a website called teakmaster.com, and it’s a website that’s filled with a ton of information—before and afters, videos, tons of content. Take a look at it. It’s really an amazing site to see.

Thank you guys so much for tuning in. Please click that like button if you guys like what you saw. Please follow us because we’re coming out with more content and videos addressing exterior wood refinishing concerns just like this. If you guys have any comments or you want to leave any sort of message down below in the comment section, please do so—we’d love to hear your feedback.

I want to thank you so much for tuning in. It’s Tim Gilliam with Teak Master, signing out.