Tiny House Face Lift

This is something we’ve debated for most of our time living tiny. When we were building our house Tim preferred leaving the cedar siding “au natural” and since I didn’t feel particularly passionate either way we went with that. In Alberta the bottom of the siding got dirty and there were stains from where the vents came out of the house. When we came to the west coast we now had to deal with a much higher level of moisture and that added a whole new challenge. We decided to see if we could clean up the cedar siding first and then we hoped to stain it. Tim had a few weeks off of work during Covid so he was able to focus on trying some ideas. We went to the hardware store and they recommended a certain cleaner to get the siding all cleaned up first. We tried it and Tim wasn’t very impressed with it. I did some research and we decided to try vinegar. We started with a little test area and Tim would spray it on and let it sit for a moment and then scrub. He thought that this method worked much better than the special cleaner from the store so he continued to use it for the whole rear side of the house. It was tedious and time consuming but worked well. We had a friend come over one day and saw the progress and suggested using a pressure washer. He volunteered the use of his and so Tim tried that and found it worked just as well as the vinegar scrubbing method, but clearly a lot faster.  Check out the pictures of the cleaning:

Once the siding was clean we were able to stain the siding. We were tempted to just leave it clean and unstained but knew that we live in a humid climate and believe it is best to protect it. So Tim got to staining it. We got our materials from Home Hardware: a brush specifically designed for stain and Beauti-Tone Wood Shield acrylic stain in Exterior Cedar (we thought we’d stick with the cedar siding theme).

We are extremely pleased with the results. Tim said it was worth all the effort he put in, which is great because it’s not exactly an easy process from what I hear stripping stain from siding. Here is a before cleaning, after cleaning and after stain comparison: