This looks about as awful as I expected:
The previous owners replaced the deck two years ago, but the contractor installed more than half the planks with the grain cupped upward. The job was so bad the contractor replaced the most egregiously warped planks (over by the door and out of sight on the right) under warranty, but left all the other mis-oriented planks in place, presumably because they weren’t that bad yet.
The bare wood must age for a while before staining, so the shelf of painting supplies held a year-old gallon can as a reminder, with about two inches of stain / preservative in the bottom. I applied it to the “new” planks with pleasing results that absolutely do not match the rest of the weathered wood. With nothing to lose and plenty to gain, I applied the rest of the potion to the worst of the upside-down planks, producing the egregiously bad result you see above.
Given how the stain weathered to oblivion over the course of the last year, I expect all those planks will become roughly the same shade of ugly by next summer, when I might possibly be motivated to slather another gallon over the deck.
A friend observes: Houses are trouble.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
3 responses to “Worst Deck Staining Job Ever”
Just bite the bullet and replace it with some Trex or other synthetic deck material. Wood exposed to the weather is a losing battle.
It may be a sunk cost fallacy, but we’re gonna run that wood until it drops …
Everything I’ve heard & read says you must re-stain / paint / preserve exterior wood every two or three years, at most, for maximum life. At that rate, it would be almost entirely preservative by the end of its life, which may account for why everybody loses interest in the project after the first two applications. :grin:
[…] After taking that picture, I rammed four threaded brass inserts into the holes, thereby eliminating the need for a handful of washers and nuts, some of which were absolutely certain to disappear through gaps in the deck. […]