The beauty of a deck project, from a sales standpoint, is that if someone is going to protect the wood properly, it usually needs to be done every two or three years. You’ll be hard pressed to convince the pro painter to wait any longer, and if you do wait too long, the wood starts to fall apart.

If your customer’s serious about it, once you show him all he needs to buy and do for his project, you’ve got a guaranteed sale for the next go-round. Your “do-it-for-me” con-tractor gets this business after the homeowner gets tired of doing it himself.

This project was completed by Steve Hamilton and his assistant John, both of Hamilton Interiors of Florissant, MO.TPD’s Project 202 shows you a few of the products that should be in your customer’s cart when he comes in to coat his deck. We chose average-sized decks; a customer with a deck this size can clean and power wash one day and stain the next. That, and many of your customers will be doing a project of this size. It’s not that expensive, yet the before and after can be quite dramatic.