Staining Barn Boards

We are taking advantage of a few sunny days - and the short period between blackberry harvest and grape harvest - to work on our barn boards.  We have over 3600 board feet of white pine lumber, which we plan to use for refinishing the outside of the barn with a board and batten look.

The lumber was cut back in January, and since then has been drying out nicely.  The boards are definitely ready to be stained - but it took us a while to choose the type of stain and the color.



We finally selected a Sikkens product, called ProLuxe, which is a translucent, water repellent wood finish that is good for siding and log homes.  The color we eventually decided on is a simple natural oak, the lightest of the sample shades in the picture above.

We are staining both sides and all the edges of each board - and each board is 16 ft long....so this is a very slow process.  It took a full day for one person to stain 4 layers of boards from our pile of 27 layers.  We used extra fence posts as supports for the drying boards - they were taking up the entire area in front of the barn.