So in this video I want to explain something a little out of the ordinary
that I'm going to be doing to these brand new white cedar shingles that I've
installed on this shed. I've made several videos about refurbishing this old, what
is it now, 33 year old shed and I want to do some finishing now. You might be
wondering why would I want to put anything on these shingles because they look so nice and they do. If I could do something that would keep these shingles
looking the way they are now forever or for at least a long time I would do it
but I can't. What I am doing, what I have done, is to put a clear sealer on the
window trim and the corner boards. This should keep the wood looking like that
for about three or four years and when it does get gray because those pieces
are flat I can sand them and then re-establish that kind of lighter look
I won't be able to do that on these shingles just because of the texture of them of course. I could just leave the shingles the way they are but there's a
problem with that. What's going to happen is I'm going to get lots of weathering on on the bottom. The closer to the ground the more weathering I'm going to
get and then as I get up under the eaves there's not going to be very much
weathering at all. In fact here on the north side of the shed under the eaves
those top shingles would probably not change color at all. So you get this
really ratty looking variation where you got black shingles on the bottom and
very light shingles on the top and I really don't like that look. So I'm going
to do something and I'm going to show it to you now. You only ever have to do it once and it creates a kind of an even dark brown dark gray kind of look and
and it's even that's one thing and it it never needs to be redone. There's
nothing to peel. It's really a kind of a non-toxic chemical treatment that does
this job and that's this is what I'm going to use. I've used this for a long
time now probably more than 20 years. I'm going to mix it up for you. It's a
powder that you mix with water and then you spray it on. You just have to wet the
surface because like I said it's not a conventional finish and that there's a
film that has to dry or anything like that. This is a chemical treatment of the
wood that makes makes it an even color, makes it look good. They tell me that it
offers some rot resistance too. I'm not sure that's very hard to verify and
these are cedar shingles, white cedar shingles, so they don't really need rot
protection anyway. They're gonna last for 40 or 50 years or longer. So let's go
over. I'll load up the sprayer and I'll show you how the process begins. As I
mentioned this is a powder. It dissolves in water. Envelopes of this size make up
one gallon and one gallon covers about a hundred and fifty square feet. I'll take a
look at it here. There's no smell and it's non-toxic. I don't think I'd eat it but
you don't have to worry about it hurting you. I'm gonna be making three
envelopes of this stuff. I think that should do the job and as I said you just
have to get this onto the surface in any way that works. So I'm using
this pretty fancy gas-powered backpack sprayer. You don't need anything this fancy. My regular pump-up sprayer that I use for this sort of thing has some stuff in
it right now. So I'm getting out the big guns. Our job is just to simply wet
the surface with this. Make sure it's thoroughly wet and then we stand back and watch the
changes happen. The changes kind of happen pretty quickly, right? It varies. It's funny, I
don't know why it varies. I think it has to do partially with the species of wood
and whether there's any mill glaze, any burnishing on the surface that prevents
absorption. White cedar shingles seem to be pretty responsive. They have been in
the past. They were at my place. Yes, they're very responsive. So I think we're gonna see some
changes this afternoon. You don't see the full change until several months later and it can be
quite striking but it's not gonna happen too fast. That should be enough. I'll fire up the sprayer
and we'll go and get busy. So here we are 24 hours later and I've intentionally left the north side of the
shed unsprayed. This is what you saw me do yesterday. This is the stuff I'm gonna do in
a few minutes when I get off the camera here just to finish the job. But of course this is not the
extent of the change. It's actually much more dramatic than this as time goes on and as you'll
see. This is what the treatment looks like when it's fully mature. This is the same white cedar
shingles, exactly the same as you saw in the shed. This was sprayed six years ago. It didn't take six
years to get to look like this. It probably got this way after two or three months. Then it was
stabilized. But you can see that it's an even weathered color and the effect goes right up to
the eaves which is really the main reason to do this. You want even weathering because it just
looks really good bottom line. Well thank you for joining me. I hope you've found this
video useful for some outdoor projects you've got at your place. If you're watching on YouTube
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