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Protecting & painting a timber log store

Protecting & Maintaining Timber Log Stores

A timber log store is an attractive and practical way to season and store logs and kindling for your fire. We have a log burner to boost our heating in the winter and got a Hutton Log Store many years ago. They’re beautifully designed and built to last decades with quality timber that has been pressure-treated with a preservative chemical to stop rot from setting in.
 
Thorndown_Wood Paint_2500As with all timber products it still needs a protective coating of a good quality wood paint to make it watertight and protect it from the weather. Thorndown Wood Paint is specifically engineered for exterior use, with a high performing acrylic resin that creates a durable water-repellent coating, and VOC free exterior grade colour pigments that are made to stay strong and true for many years.
 
Paint with two coats for full exterior protection, although roofs take a hammering from the weather and are more exposed to UV so a third coat will make the coating more durable and last longer. 
 
The raw materials that go into Thorndown Wood Paint are of the highest quality and designed to last up to 10 years, although a maintenance coat can be required much earlier than this depending on levels of wear and tear and exposure.
 
Our log store had been neglected for years so the old oil based coating had worn and faded a lot, and there was a heavy build-up of dirt and algae.

PREPARATION

The first job was to clean off the old dirt and algae. You can use a soapy water solution and scrubbing brush to do this but as the build up was so thick, we used a pressure washer. The advantage of this is that it is really quick and easy, literally blasting off the dirt and algae. The downside is that power washers are very powerful and aggressive so can strip off old coatings. In this instance the old coating was flaky and peeling so we wanted to get rid of the old loose parts.

After power washing we left it to dry then checked it over. There was still some old loose coating and stubborn dirt and algae so we used a power sander to strip those elements off. Then a final dust off to remove sand dust and any loose elements, then it was ready to paint.

PAINTING

Thorndown Wood Paint comes in a wide range of 72 colours and a UV Clear, plus more than 1800 RAL Classic and Design colours making it quite easy to match to old colour coatings.
 
I chose Mercury Grey as it’s a lovely strong grey and would work perfectly with the grey colour palette of the decking area.

The first coat always takes a lot more time and paint and with a slatted product, is more time-consuming as you have lots of area to cover and gaps, nooks and crannies that you need to make sure to get the paint into, especially on the roof. 

Although Thorndown Wood Paint is a of a lovely consistency that is easy to paint with, holding to the brush and flowing well onto the surface so drips are rare, it’s always good practice to check over your area once painted to tidy up any drips.

Drying time is really quick and on a nice fine dry day it can be ready to overcoat within 30-60 minutes. On cooler days leave for 1-2 hours.

Once dry, I painted on a second coat starting with the roof so that by the time I’d finished the second coat on the rest of the log store, the roof was dry enough for me to paint on a final booster third coat. Horizontal surfaces including roofs suffer from a lot more wear and tear and exposure to the sun, rain, freezing ice and snow, so coatings will degrade a lot quicker than on vertical surfaces. Hence a third coat making the surface even more durable and extending the time between maintenance coats.

I then left it to dry for 24 hours allowing the coating to properly fix and cure, making sure there wasn’t any rain forecast within that time, then re-loaded the log store ready for cold winter months.

Tutorial Videos

Below is the link to a tutorial video showing how we carried out the maintenance and painting of the log store. A straight forward and fairly easy job to do, creating a piece that is not just functional but a beautiful piece of the garden design.

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