Hi Everyone!

I am getting ready to start a deck staining project this week, and have never stained a deck before so I'm looking for any advice I can get! I'm not a total newbie, my husband and I have remodeled several houses, and have painted more I like to think about, but never had one with a deck before. I bought olympic maximum semi-transparent stain in mahogany, and its a pretty dark color. Now, I do know from research many people on here are against paints and stains from lowes, but we are in the middle of remodeling the whole house and we wanted to put it on our lowes card for now, so thats what we got.

I am working with a deck that is 11 years old, it had been painted/stained at one time with a solid color that was 90% gone at the time we bought the house this past winter. The deck was mostly grayed/green and had a huge stain from the prev owners grease bucket on their grill. We have cleaned and pressure washed the deck, used a deck brightener and tomorrow I am going to lightly sand it. It looks 100% better already and the stain from the grill is barely noticeable now.

So my questions are: How many coats should I expect to need? I've read on couple of posts saying not to use more then one coat, but the stain instructions dont say one way or the other. I would imagine with the age of the wood it will suck it right up. If I need to do two coats how long should I wait in between? Where should I start staining? I'm thinking I should do the rails first then the floor board.

Also, it says a dry time is 24 hours, I'm guessing this is how long it will need before it can be rained on, or do you think it will need longer? I'm going to have to plan carefully to avoid summer thunderstorms!

I live in southwestern Virginia and have both very hot summers and fairly cold winters, if that effects my staining approach at all. The deck also gets mostly direct sunlight, no shading from trees at all, but it is shaded by the house until around 11 each day, so I plan to apply the stain early in the morning to avoid staining in direct sunlight as much as possible.

Thanks for any help and advice!