Can you Sand Pressure Treated Wood?

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All wood, except synthetic materials such as composite wood — even pressure-treated timber — must be sanded and painted.

If you need anything to last, you must put in the period and effort. As a result, you should sand your wooden deck after power cleaning and before painting and coating it.

Before sanding, make sure your deck is completely dry. Wait a few days before sanding if there has been substantial rain or if you have had your power cleaned.

In this regard, Can you sand treated wood?

Using an intracapsular sander, sand the wood. If the decking planks are bent and made of hardwood such as teak, do your initial pass with coarse 03-grit sandpaper.

On the other hand, wood product decks do not require rigorous treatment, particularly if the wood remains upright. Begin with an 80-grit paper.

You have pressure-treated wood and need it to last and look good for as long as possible. In some articles, you may have heard that sanding is necessary before painting, coating, or polishing outdoor wood, such as a deck or gate.

This is true for eliminating mill shine from fresh timber, eliminating stripping paint from old wood, or re-sanding after multiple re-coats over the decades to recover it before painting it again. The only exception is pressure-treated timber.

The day I stopped sanding pressure-treated wood was a watershed event in my local wood repair and deck painting enterprise.

Since making this move, my irritation with expectation management has vanished, resulting in a better experience for my clients and staff.

Pressure-treated wood projects are becoming more popular every year as a more cost-effective alternative to woods such as cedar.

This necessarily exacerbates the difficulties connected with pressure-treated wood, making it critical that you understand appropriate maintenance and the potential ramifications before coming to a decision.

Therefore, you cannot sand pressure-treated wood because of the following reasons;

It appears to be terrible

When you look at the image that has been sand pressure-treated, it appears terrible. I physically sanded for a client a few years ago.

This item was sanded in the same manner as usual to demonstrate a point. This is a close-up of how your pressure-treated deck may look after sanding.

Balance after many additional laps with a sander over the darker portions to even them out; it appears that the lighter sections of wood have been sanded more than the remainder.

When discussing pressure-treated wood to users, the two terms that keep coming up are unreliable and unexpected. You have no clue what the wood will look like once sanded.

The danger is not worth it. After spending time, labor, and budget in a deck or gate, you should be able to fully enjoy it rather than feeling ashamed while entertaining relatives and other visitors with unfavorable outcomes that could have been prevented.

It is irreversible

Ideally, you are reviewing this piece as part of your homework before doing any operation, and my reasoning will keep you from sanding your pressure-treated lumber.

If you are viewing this because you have already sanded your deck and are questioning how to repair it, the bad news is that it will never look the same as it did when you purchased it new.

There is no way to restore the original appearance of pressure-treated wood once it has been sanded through electrochemical techniques.

If your pressure-treated timber appears like the one above after sanding, the temptation is to sand even more deeply to remove all of the covering and make it look more even.

Although this appears to be a straightforward method, some of the chemical coatings get flushed into the wood all the way through, particularly around tangles where the openings are wider, permitting the chemicals to flow through.

Consequently, you will have more unmanageable two-toned wood and be even more disappointed with the result of your job.

Inconsistency in Quality

Quality varies, as it does with every product. After sanding, not all pressure-treated timber will appear like the photographs in this article.

Because there are so many possible outcomes, the challenge is not knowing if an issue will arise but never being able to forecast when and what issues will emerge reliably.

Furthermore, no firm will identify itself as “poor quality,” making it hard to decide which type to buy if you are on the market.

Or, given that you are still reading this post, the more probable scenario is that you already have pressure-treated wood and are investigating how to best care for it.

Maybe you bought pressure-treated wood for a venture decades ago and now want to paint it, or maybe you moved into a house that already has a deck or fence made of PT timber. You have no notion what kind it is in any situation.

The great news is that it does not matter with pressure-treated wood since it is so unexpected that you might also try to anticipate when the next stock market meltdown will occur.

The only foreseeable results with most PT wood are that it will dry out, bend, fracture, and the screws will break and stick out, giving your kids shreds when they play.

The apparent remedy is to refrain from sanding pressure-treated wood. Here is a quick rundown to get you started:

If you are in the market for a new piece of wood, I advise investing in cherry or Ipe since they are simpler to maintain and produce consistent results no matter what age or even how many times they have been painted.

If you have a fresh novel or grayish or untreated pressure wood, you can select to wash the deck with a cleanser instead of sanding.

If your pressure-treated wood has already been sanded, you may have to live with the appearance until you choose to alter the wood or hide it with a stronger or dense stain.

Nevertheless, it would help if you only sanded a pressure-treated deck when necessary. Thus, you cannot sand pressure-treated wood.