cleaning wood stained from exposure

Hi all,

I hired a log home builder that worked very slowly on the project and then abandoned it all together.

We have walls, framing, roof without shingles (I've been told all of the roof decking will need to be replaced). The house gets lots of water in it when it rains.

The second story was going to be siding rather than logs, but the builder never put most of the siding up. It's been sitting, stacked, in the yard for just over a year now. In sunny, muggy, north Florida. Nothing has been done on the house for 6 months while we waited for the builder, then dealt with lawyers and the bank (construction loan), but we've finally been cleared to start doing things ourselves.

I'm going to have to do a lot of it myself, as the builder took the bulk of the construction loan proceeds and has left us in bad financial shape.

So... I'm probably going to be on the forum here with lots of questions :)

The first one is this - how is the best way to clean the wood, the logs and siding?

The wood is bare, no stain or sealant has been applied. There are large dark spots inside the house. The siding that has been sitting in the sun and rain is brown.

The builder had told us they would clean everything with boric acid before applying stain and sealant (Permachink).

Here are some images: https://photos.app.goo.gl/P5DdMB9qsdf3TTgL7

I've spoken to some guys that do pressure washing (I know not to "pressure" wash the wood). They suggested sodium hypochlorite or a fence wash. One guy said to hit everything with concrobium - but I'm not sure if that was just for mold or to freshen the color on the wood, or both?

I know the builder hit it with boric acid once. It did clean it up nicely, though the front that is exposed to the sun is odd - you can see that on that pic of the front porch.

How would you recommend I clean up these stains before putting the siding up and staining/sealing? And what ratios of water/chemicals as well?

Thanks for any suggestions,

Chris

I'm surprised I haven't gotten any responses on this.

Any thoughts?

Chris

I think the lack of response is just because many here are owner/builders and don't have a huge experience of dealing with this situation .

Sorry to hear the issues, doesn't sound fun.

There are different products that are meant to take the gray out, some more aggressive than others

I would suggest if you try a product, do it on a small section first and see if you get the results you want . A lot may contain bleach etc.

We are using a couple products from Sashco for cleaning and brightening, but our logs have only sat about a year, so not a huge amount of gray. It's not the most aggressive product.

Pressure washing may not hurt, don't be too aggressive with it, but it may fuzz up the wood which will have to be sanded off after.



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Thanks Shark,

I'll take a look at Sashco and do some experimenting. Thank you for your thoughts on this,

Chris

we pressure washed the gray out of our logs, which caused a lot of fuzz. So then I went back with a brush attachment for my sander and got rid of the fuzz. On the inside, I then sanded the logs and put a matte water based polycrylic on them. On the outside, we went with Sashco water based stain. I think next time we will do q8 oil based stain.