In our first article in this series, we mentioned that decking boards are not a finished product right off the bat when you purchase them from the lumber yard. Due to the arduous journey that many tropical decking boards make on their way from the forest to their final destination, there’s plenty of time for them to accumulate dirt, mud, and other impurities. We left off on our last part of the discussion with the lumber making the long trip across the ocean. We’ll pick up with when the decking boards reach the lumber yard.

Waiting at the Lumber Yard

When the decking materials finally make it to the lumber yard, they tend to sit around for a while until someone finally orders them for a specific job. Whether they’re tropical or domestic decking boards, they’ll all tend to accumulate even more hard-to-get-rid-of dirt, grime, and mud during this part of the process. That’s the main reason why rather than sanding and cleaning the boards before shipping them out, a majority of lumber dealers usually won’t bother. They know from experience that the boards will just get dirty all over again on their next leg of the journey.

Arrival at the Job Site

Last but not least, the decking finally makes its way to your work site. It will inevitably have picked up more grime on the way there. As it waits in storage on the job site until you’re ready to install it, it will get even dirtier. Stacking and unstacking, sitting under a tarp in changing weather conditions, and getting trampled on by muddy work boots throughout the installation process will all take its toll on the decking boards. By the time the project is completed, the boards often tend to look pretty rough.

So what should you do to get your deck boards looking like the clean, beautiful boards you saw in your lumber dealer’s advertisement photos? That’s the next topic we’re going to turn our attention to for the remainder of this article.

Transforming Your Ipe Decking from Muddy to Magnificent

As you can clearly see, there are good reasons why Ipe dealers don’t spend extra time cleaning and sanding the boards before installation. All it would end up doing is increasing the cost of your project and causing the decking materials to take a longer time to reach you. Because the entire journey adds more and more dirt and grime, attempting to clean it up in advance would be an exercise in futility. Once the boards are actually on-site and installed, however, you can get to work making them look their best.

In the rest of this article series, we’ll take a closer look at how to achieve the best possible results from your tropical hardwood decking boards. Following such simple steps as carefully sanding the boards, allowing plenty of time for them to rest, and then meticulously cleaning and oiling them can make a world of difference in the overall look and feel of your new deck.

Continue reading with Part 3.