We hired a contractor to maintain our IPE Deck built in August 2012. He applied the initial treatment in October 2012. It came out beautifully.

The first week in August, I contacted him again to retreat to maintain the rich IPE wood coloring. .Due to an impending rain, he cleaned and conditioned the deck on a Friday morning. It did rain less than 12 hours after he completed that process.

He returned the following Monday morning to apply the Sikkens Cetol SRD 078 to the IPE deck. He completed this process in less than one hour on a 500 square foot deck. Once again, it rained less than 12 hours after the application.

More than 48 hours later, the deck remains shiny, sticky/tacky and the odor of the product persists. I contacted the contractor about these issues as I had read that these are signs of over application of the product.

He emailed me to say that the weather conditions this summer in Massachusetts have been unusually humid. He said to give the product another week to cure and to minimized foot traffic on the deck.

My main questions: Does this product take a week or longer to cure under humid conditions? If not, and this is an issue of incorrect prep or over application, how can we rectify the problem?

Thanks in advance for any information and/or feedback you are able to provide to me.