Redwood and Mahogany Wood Siding Refinishing

And then it continues. These aren’t as bad because it’s under a covered patio.

And then we have this, and then we have some redwood siding. Take a look at this—this is what varnish does. This is why you never use varnish on such a large surface like this.

Take a look at this pillar here. You’ve got this area here where it has oxidized and is blistering and peeling. This is terrible—this is going to ruin their wood. Then you come over here to this side, and it’s not so bad. You have color, and this is because the sun hits that other area and doesn’t hit this as much. But you still have the blistering and peeling all over the place. So even if it is in indirect sun, it does not last.

We’ve got the pergola supports over here, and we’ll go over here. Just look at this horrible, horrible work. I don’t know what happened over here, but it looks like the wood got scorched by the sun. I’m not positive—it’s weird. And then you’ve got the siding here, and you’ve got the pergola overhang. Everything is blistering and peeling, everything is atrocious.

Okay, so this is the side of the property, and as you can see, they’re all peeling. They don’t look as bad, but they’re bad and they need to be done.

They’re all blistering and peeling. This is mahogany.

Okay, so take a look at this front area—blistering, it’s peeling. You’ve got the pond area here, which we’ve covered, and it’s all peeling and blistering, and it looks terrible. And furthermore, it’s some sort of solid opaque stain that they applied to this redwood in the front of the house. It looks terrible.

They’ve stripped this area here, so that’s down to a stripped sort of state. It’s not sanded yet, it’s just stripped and scraped, and it’s going to look really beautiful when we’re done. Unfortunately, the homeowner trusted some sort of blow-and-go finishing pro, as we say, to do this, and it really messed it up.

Then we come over here—take a look at the detail. We’ve covered all the windows, we taped everything off. It’s a little windy today, there is a tarp down here catching this varnish that they’re scraping off these mahogany windows.

He’s brushing on the paste that will bubble this varnish coating. Take a look at it bubbling it so we can scrape it. You wait a few minutes, kind of have to sort of know what you’re doing, because if you’re doing this in direct sunlight and it’s really hot out, it’s going to work faster and even dry faster if you leave it on for too long. So you gotta know what you’re doing. Let it bubble enough to where it can be scraped off, and we’re at about that stage already. I know different people will say, “Hey, leave it on for five hours and come back.” Nope, sorry, gotta know what you’re doing—you gotta go according to the weather, and that’s what we’re doing.

So we’ve got the peeling up here, and then we go down here where we have the mahogany windows fully scraped, and then we have some of the redwood. And if we come over here, we’ve got Indy here doing some detailed work. There’s no fast way to do this. It’s got to go slow and scrape these different levels of the windows. We collect all this debris, and we actually take it to a recycling facility where they can dispose of it in the proper manner.

Really excited, the guys are working really hard. They’ve stripped this redwood in the back here. Now they’re sanding, they’re doing some intense sanding with the Festool system and grinding it, getting off this interior terrible coating.

Okay, so we’ve got all these columns stripped and fully sanded, and look how beautiful they are. The siding—clear redwood—and then we’ve got the pergola overhang beams all stripped down. Might be a little overexposed because the sun’s pretty extreme.

Come back over here and all those termited boards were removed and replaced. You could see we’ve got some of the new boards that don’t match the older boards, but what else can you do? You can’t get them to match perfectly because they are brand new. This was the worst area right here that was fully termited, so we replaced those boards. We put the membrane paper behind so it’ll protect the column itself. And then we’ve got this beautiful, fully sanded, fully stripped redwood. Takes a lot of attention to detail to get it like this—a lot of muscle, a lot of power, the right tools, and the right expertise.

I also just wanted to point out something you can’t really see unless I zoom in. When they constructed this door, they used finishing nails and put what appears to be some sort of filler—but it’s actually pink, could be because of the wood—so it looks like Bondo, believe it or not. So who knows. So we need to adjust the opacity, if you will, so we can cover this type of stuff up. Furthermore, you want to cover up stuff like this, so you’re going to really have to adjust the opacity to cover up all of these filler holes, which should have been plugged if you really wanted to see the actual grain and color of the wood.

So here is the proof in the pudding. Here we’ve got this area—half of it is this blistering and peeling sort of opaque-type coating, and then you have it all stripped and sanded back here. And then you come around here—you still got this area that’s opaque and blistering and peeling. You’ve got this area here that’s been stripped but not sanded, and then you have the area right here that has been sanded. Look how beautiful this redwood comes back when it’s properly refinished.

Okay, so we’re in the back of the house, and as you can see all of these windows have been stripped. Come on over here, we’ve got this sort of little pond viewing area stripped and all of these windows—take a look at the windows down there. And once you come up over here, you can see how beautiful and smooth this mahogany is—really, really beautiful mahogany. And it’s definitely a step above. It’s not every day that someone has their entire house lined with mahogany.

So we stripped it down, and we’re gonna make this look beautiful again. And it just needed to be stripped all the way down because the coating was too far gone to try to do a simple maintenance. So the right way is to start over, strip it down, sand it, get it down to bare wood, and we’re going to go ahead and put the sealer on and then multiple layers of varnish, and it’s going to look really, really beautiful and magnificent, and it’ll be maintainable moving forward.

Finishing up, doing a little bit of fine-tuning. Got the front door, this area over here—it’s really nice. We removed all that peeling opaque stain that was done by the blow-and-go finishing pro. It’s all gone. You fix that jerk’s work—beautiful natural mahogany, natural redwood, ready to go. Doing a little more fine-tuning. Here’s the guys fine-tuning, just making sure it’s perfect, then of course always keeping a clean and efficient job site.

Okay guys, so we’re on the back side of the house. We’re about to finish up, it’s the last day we’re here, and I just wanted to point out the beauty of the actual windows and doors. I also wanted to point out a couple things here—if you look down here on the floor, there’s nothing on the floor in terms of drips or stain or anything like that. There’s nothing on the wall. We taped everything off, and what you have here is just beautiful refinished mahogany.

If you want to come in here and zoom, maybe down here is a better shot on some of the beautiful natural mahogany—it looks absolutely amazing. It’s a low-luster finish; it’s technically matte, but once you get multiple coats on here, it picks up a little bit of a sheen because you’re doing multiple coats. But it looks matte for the most part. The customer is really happy, and especially when dust and debris land on it, it’s going to tone down a little bit—you’re not going to see as much of the sheen.

And then if you want to come up here, we’ve got this gazebo overhang pergola thing here where we replaced the termite-infested boards, and it had rot, and we replaced the membrane on the back with the appropriate paper. And then we sanded down the overhang here, and the coating that we used is natural. We used a natural oil-based penetrating sealer for redwood that penetrates in, protects from within, highlights the natural grain and color, and it dries matte and is maintainable moving forward.

If you remember, it was blistering, it was peeling, it was totally unsightly. The peeling areas were flying into the pool and it looked absolutely terrible. And then now, take a look at all of this stuff—it’s beautiful, ready to go, everything’s clean, beautiful, and ready for our client to enjoy in the new year. And he’s totally stoked, we’re totally happy, and it’s been an excellent project and a real challenge to get it done in three weeks—but we did it. It looks amazing. I hope you guys enjoy.