Wood preserver

On 24th October last I celebrated the construction of a winter house for the pipework outside the kitchen door, a winter house which we have decided not to take down for the summer.

Two of the issues not mentioned on that occasion concerned the roof. First, the type of tongue & groove board used (see sketch of section left), while fine for a vertical fascia or the side of a shed, is not so clever for a roof at 45 degrees, with water being apt to lodge in the top feather edge, the one next to the wall, in the depression formed at A. Second, due to some problem with wood preserver, the nature of which I no longer remember, the top feather edge is an irritatingly different shade of jacobean oak than the rest of the house.

And apart from that, the fence behind the water butt is also two tone, this simply because I ran out of wood preserver when applying a renewing coat some years after the fence had been installed.

So earlier in the week off to by some more, starting in Homebase where we found great mounds of all kinds of different stuffs, some something called 'decking oil', whatever that may be, and nearly all of it sold in very large quantities. I suspected most of it of being the sort of wood preserver which is like a low grade paint, the finish of which I greatly dislike, rather than the sort which is rather like wood stain.

Gave up there and tried Wickes, a useful if rather cheap'n'cheerful place, and wound up with a 5 litre tin of own-brand something described as traditional wood preserver (dark oak). There was hope in that the stuff seemed to slop around in the tin the way old-speak Cuprinol would have. There was comfort in that it only cost £19.99 rather than the £29.99 asked for the nearest thing from Homebase.

Then today I get out a plastic mac and a brush and get cracking, to very rapidly find that maybe the reason that people like the paint-like wood preserver is that it does not slop all over the place, which the Wickes stuff certainly does unless you are very careful about how you hold and fill the brush. With the good news being that it does not bond very well with damp surfaces, so if you water the surrounding concrete before you start, your concrete does not end up pale brown.

All done after about 2 hours, including the time needed to empty and move the water butt. Used maybe 1 litre of the 5 available. All looking much better and no longer two tone - although I now know that the fence behind the water butt is in a reasonably fragile condition and I may have to touch up the formerly white wall behind the pipe house.