Deck & Fence Staining in Alpharetta, GA

Deck & Fence Staining for Alpharetta homes

The bulk of Alpharetta's houses went up between the early 1980s and the early 2000s. Windward, the Mobil-developed lake community that began selling in 1983, is the clearest example: 44 neighborhoods in a variety of styles around Lake Windward, many on sloped lots with full daylight basements, some still unfinished and stubbed for a bath. Fronts tend to be brick or stone, with hardboard, cedar or early fiber-cement lap on the sides and rear, and some later homes in the area were clad in synthetic or three-coat stucco. Older still is Alpharetta Estates, built roughly 1972 to 1982 on large wooded lots near downtown, where the ranches carry four or five decades of wear. Downtown keeps a handful of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century homes, from Greek Revival to the 1912 Queen Anne Mansell House, with clapboard and old plaster. The newest stock is the townhome and condo infill around Avalon and City Center, where the work is mostly interior: paint, flooring and finish upgrades.

Areas we work in Alpharetta

• Windward
• The Spinnakers at Windward
• Alpharetta Estates
• Downtown Alpharetta
• Avalon

Near Avalon, Wills Park, Big Creek Greenway and across the rest of Alpharetta.

Deck & Fence Staining on Alpharetta houses

Alpharetta has a lot of decks sitting on the back of sloped lots, off the main floor and a full story above a daylight basement, especially around Lake Windward and the wooded streets near Webb Bridge Park. Those decks are mostly pressure-treated pine, some with cedar rails, and the ones in deep shade stay damp and turn green while the sunny side bleaches and checks. Many have been coated over the years with a mix of semi-transparent stain and solid stain or deck paint, which is the hardest surface to restain evenly. Fences here are usually wood privacy runs between backyards, often with the bottom boards sitting in mulch or soil.

What usually gets missed

Layered coatings are the problem to read first. Once a deck has had solid stain or deck paint on it, a semi-transparent stain will not soak in, and it ends up peeling off in patches. On the tall decks above a basement, the posts, ledger and stair stringers also get checked, because a soft post base is a carpentry job, not a stain job. We strip or clean a test area to see what is bonded before choosing the product.