How often should you treat your fence?

Why bother

Bare timber grays, warps, and rots years early. A thorough-tier job. Skippable when life's busy, worth it when it isn't.

Why it's a range

Harsh sun or heavy snow wants it every one to two years. Cedar or a solid stain can go up to five.

What the job involves

1. Clean it first. Pressure-wash or stiff-brush off the dirt, mildew and old flaking finish, then leave the wood to dry right through. That usually wants a couple of dry days back to back, so don't pick the week it's forecast to rain.
2. Fix and prep. Swap out cracked boards, hammer down the nails that have worked loose, and lightly sand the rough fuzzy spots with medium grit (120 to 150), going with the grain not across it.
3. Get the stain on. Work top to bottom in small sections with a roller, brush or sprayer, keep a wet edge and back-brush so it soaks in even rather than sitting in streaks. Mask off the plants and anything else you'd rather not speckle.
4. Let it cure, then keep to the schedule. Clear sealers want redoing about every 2 years, solid stain about every 4, semi-transparent stain every 5 to 6. Mark the next one before you put the brush away.

Do it yourself, or pay someone?

Yourself, and it's the cheapest job in the yard to do: stain and supplies run about $50 to $150 for a standard 150-foot fence. The catch is the time and the two dry days. Hiring it out runs $2 to $5 a foot for a picket fence and up to about $10 a foot for a tall privacy one, with most jobs landing between $750 and $4,250 and a national average around $1,700 to $1,900. Paying someone to pressure-wash the prep adds about $150 to $300.

What skipping it costs

$2,000 to $8,000, which is what a full fence replacement runs once bare wood has drunk up enough rain and sun to rot through. Left unsealed, boards gray, cup and crack, and the posts go soft at the soil line. An unmaintained wood fence tends to give out in roughly 7 to 12 years; a stained one runs 15 to 20 and then some. HomeAdvisor puts a new wood fence at $1,700 to $4,000 installed, and Angi has it at $10 to $30 a foot, plus another $3 to $5 a foot to tear out the old one. A few hundred dollars of stain, repeated, is the cheap end of that.

Signs it's overdue

• Water stops beading on the boards. Sprinkle a bit on and watch: if it soaks in and darkens the wood inside about 10 minutes, the finish is gone and the job's due.
• The wood's faded to a dull silvery-gray and the old stain color looks washed out or blotchy.
• Boards feel rough, dry or splintery, or they're starting to cup and crack. Worse, a post feels soft or spongy near the ground, which is rot getting an early start.

When to start thinking about it

Give yourself about 7 days' notice. That's when Grumpty starts grumbling, so it doesn't land on you the day it's due. Mark it done and Grumpty sets the next one, every 36 months, so you can go back to forgetting it exists.

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