Choosing an Easy Exterior Wood Stain

The other day I was working on a project for my back yard. (I was building an elevated gardening box for my wife.) I decided to use redwood in the project, and wanted a way to easily protect it once the building was completed. Upon investigation, I decided to use an exterior wood stain and settled on Krylon's semi-transparent wood stain. The product comes in an aerosol spray can—what could be easier?

After finishing the assembly of my project, I grabbed a few cans of the Krylon wood stain. Since I was working with unfinished and untreated redwood, I chose the redwood color wood stain. It was a clear, calm, and warm day when I grabbed the cans, and the stain went on quickly and rather easily.

Spraying was easy, given the weather conditions. The spray cans featured an "ez touch 360 dial," which seemed a bit gimmicky to me. Once I got the hang of the dial, however, applying the stain was pretty fast. I sprayed at a couple of different distances from the wood, and found that I got the best coverage for my purposes at about six or seven inches from the wood's surface.

When I was done spraying each side of the elevated garden box, I used an old t-shirt to quickly rub over the stain I'd just applied. This helped to avoid any overlap (uneven application) caused by poor aim on my part. The result was a nice, light stain layer that enhanced the natural beauty of the redwood lumber I chose.

Besides ease of application, one of the things I hoped for was that the Krylon would live up to its claim to "dry in 15 minutes or less." The drying time for my project was just a tad better than 15 minutes; I'm sure it helped that I live in a low-humidity area and was working on a warm day, and it didn't hurt that I used the t-shirt trick to rub down the stain.

My project consisted of just over 64 square feet of surface area, as I did not want to stain the interior of my garden box. My original estimate of two cans of Krylon wood stain was close, but still a bit short. Info on the cans say that the 12 ounces of stain will cover about 25 square feet; I found that I was able to use almost all of three cans on my project.

All in all, I was pleased with the Krylon exterior wood stain. It seemed to perform as promised, and the color and luster of the stain was great. I'm sure I will consider their wood stain for future projects of this type.