Refinished Deck - 1 Year Later

It’s been one year since we revealed our refinished deck with Penofin Oil Finish, here’s how it is holding up!

Last year we refinished our deck and it was QUITE the task. Days of sanding, cleaning, staining….and the results were shocking. Like…a good shocking.

READ THE FULL STEP BY STEP TUTORIAL FOR HOW TO RESTORE A DECK HERE!

You guys were super invested alongside without throughout the ride as we shared all of the behind the scenes on Instagram Stories of our refinished deck. In fact, you can still rewatch all those stories if you go to our profile and go all to the right and find the “deck” highlight.

We did a lot of research before we refinished the deck to try to find the best deck stain.

This post contains affiliate links, but nothing that I wouldn’t wholeheartedly recommend anyway! Read my full disclosure here.

What deck stain we used and why

We ended up using Penofin’s Blue Label Brazilian Rosewood Oil Finish in Redwood Color for a lot of different reasons, which detail in the blog post. But here’s a quick summary of why we chose this deck finish.

It has great reviews, which always a good sign, right?
It’s an oil based penetrating stain, so it goes deep into the deck boards…this is a win win because it makes it a deep, rich color AND it doesn’t require sanding later down the road when you need to freshen it up.
You can see the wood grain through the stain, unlike some surface sitting stains and deck paints that cover that up.

Now that it’s been just over a year, I thought I would give you guys a quick update to see how it’s holding up.

When you doing something like refinishing a deck, you want to be sure that you’re choosing the best finish for your deck – but it’s hard to know how it’s going to hold up over time. So that’s why I thought I’d give you guys this update.

Why every refinished deck is different

Before I jump right into showing you how our deck looks a year after refinishing, let me start with a little disclaimer. We live in Central Oregon, which is technically a high desert area. Although we get snow and lots of weather, we are still a very dry climate with almost humidity.

That definitely comes into factor when you are looking at how a refinished deck holds up over time and even how it absorbs the stain. A lot of that has to do with how fast the wood dries out, which is based on your humidity.

Another quick disclaimer is that we followed ALL the steps when we were refinishing our deck last year. We sanded it all the way down to bare wood. Check out the full tutorial to see all the steps we took. If you cut corners here and there, your deck may not hold up as well.

Lastly, how much sun, rain or snow your deck gets may come into factor here as well. So keep that in mind.

So, how’s our refinished deck holding up 1 year later?

Well, I think it’s looking pretty dang good.

It is definitely not 100% from the day we refinished it. But you have to remember that this deck sat under multiple feet of snow for many months. It’s been baked by the sun. Played on. Dog claws and all.

I’m super happy with how it looks.

There is some lighter spots around the knots – which we think is because the wood is more “dense” there.

At the end of the summer, we will probably do a little “refresh” with pressure washing the deck and applying some more oil finish. That’s a good practice to get into as just, in general, deck maintenance.