There are a number of elements that come together when creating your dream exterior. You have to take into account features from your siding, to your door, to your windows, your shutters, and of course your deck! Staining your deck is an important element of your home that will make a big impact on your exterior overall. If you’ve been holding off on staining your deck, it’s time to take the plunge. Here are 5 steps to take to coordinate your deck with your home to ensure it turns out just the way you planned!
1. Get Clear on Your Plan
When you’re matching your deck to your home, it’s important to know your plan for your deck and house moving forward. If you plan to refinish your deck often, you should take into account that coloured stains are more difficult to remove. They also become dated more quickly than neutral colours, and you could end up getting tired or bored of them. And if you’re planning on selling your home in the next couple of years, make sure you consider what will appeal to buyers.
2. Take Cues from Your Interior
We’re all familiar with how to match paint to the interior of our homes, and this should go for our exterior as well. Use your siding as the base colour and choose a few paint chips to match against it. From here, you can shoose the one that works best with your siding. Take cues from your indoor choices – the wood you use for your floor and cabinets is often also a good fit for your deck colour.
3. Choose Your Top Coat
The coat you choose for your deck depends on the look you want. A transparent, clear coat is often ideal if you want to maintain the natural colour and grain of the wood in your deck. A semi-transparent stain will change the colour, and solid colour stains can completely cover the colour and grain, and can look like paint. Solid colour stains can cover imperfections, so it depends what you need for your deck.
4. Consider Your Patio Furniture
Patio furniture can definitely be an investment, and you want to make sure your furniture compliments your deck. Your furniture and deck should work together to create a harmonious outdoor space – they shouldn’t be competing or feel harsh against one another. If your outdoor furniture is similar in feel to your indoor furniture, you can continue your indoor flooring colour out to your deck. This will fuse the indoor and outdoor and make it feel like one continuous space.
5. Backyard Inspirations
A great way to choose your deck colour and compliment it with your space is to pull colours from your yard. This is ideal if you don’t want your indoor and outdoor space to feel like one continuous area, but instead want to delineate the two. Do you have rocks or mountains nearby? You can pull a stain colour from these elements.
If you want to match your deck to your home, use these 5 tips to create the exterior you’ve always wanted!