We had a cedar deck installed in October of 2009. Two weeks ago, a company that was very highly rated on Angie's List came out to stain/seal the deck.

After it was powerwashed, the wood turned a very odd almost brownish, purple color. It was very dark. Not at all like what we expected. We thought it would look like new.

The next day when they returned to finish the work, we were surprised as we thought the wood was still wet. It had been less than 24 hours and the overnight temperature was under 50. Our son had the flu, by the time I was able to get outside to question all of this, a huge part of the deck was already done. 5 guys were working, and they were fast.

I freaked out. The color was so dark and so ORANGE, exactly what we said we didn't want. The sample we agreed on was to mimic a new, wet cedar deck. Ours looked old, orange and ugly. I stopped the crew twice, but they insisted they had to continue.

A week later the owner came out. He thought the deck looked great. He also stated numerous times as to use only water for cleaning due to a bad experience he had 15 years ago fixing a deck that had been cleaned with bleach. He was infuriating to talk to about this as he saw that nothing was wrong. He didn't charge us, but we still hate the color. It is also very blotchy in areas, lots of drips...truly baffled how he was so highly rated...

We question his cleaning procedure, but we really need to know what our options our to remove this horrid Rymar Natural Cedar Honey color from our deck. Can we sand it? Is stripping the way to go? Do we need to let it weather or can we do this now?

We are sad that our once lovely $20,000 deck looks so unlike what we had hoped for...HELP!!!