Sealing Log Cabins | How to properly water seal a log cabin

[Music] hey this is Chris um paint Life TV so I'm here at sasco and I'm in probably the best room in the entire building the chemist room so this is where I love to talk um you know about products and stuff and learn about products what makes them uh so successful and what makes them unique and stuff and you know why by you know expensive versus cheap and so I got Jim Barnes with me today and Jim you are the senior chemist here and um and you're the chemist of what um sasco a lot of they do a lot of things so we do s sashco makes a whole lot of sealants right but we also make stains and Coatings for log homes and that's my side of it I am the stain guy I make all the stains and Coatings for sashco and you know and so I'm really excited about this portion of my tour because I happen to have a log home and so a true log home you know just outside of Tam Resort and it wasn't brand new when I got it it was weathered really bad and the logs were almost black on a portion of it I eventually uh blasted it media blasted it down to barewood again and then um I recoded it and then um I had it and unfortunately I paid to it um I wish I would have did it myself but I coated it um and it's probably two to three years ago and it's already gone peeling and stuff so I want to hear from you know Jim how did you take care of my log home what is available to me what sashco has um in some really cool stuff cuz you started talking about logs and logs move more than traditional wood so let's that's right let's talk about this I love talking about logs um and it's kind of funny we have a funny saying we say logs ain't wood um of course logs really are wood we're not dumb right but what we mean by that is that logs don't behave like traditional wood behaves that we're used to using every day right we're used to having uh siding and trim and stuff like that it's like these little 1x4 pieces uh we're used to building with dimensional um 2x4s that have been cut out of trees right but this isn't a log right there's a lot missing that we've cut away for this to be a log if we look back at a log this is a log right right and what's interesting is you know cut down trees right you peel whatever else and you make log homes out of them and over time what happens is they develop a big check sometimes multiple checks all over it that's relieving the stress that's built up in the wood what happens is logs as they as they dry they dry circum circumferentially circum circum I'm going to mess that all up the outside of the logs is going to shrink a lot faster than the ins inside of the logs and so what we have is we have all this dress built up and as it as it builds up eventually it just snaps it and cracks it and you split wood before yeah split takes a lot of work to power through some you can imagine the amount of stress is involved in doing that well that movement doesn't stop just because we have a nice big check here right every single day when this log heats up in the sunshine it's going to start expanding and it'll close that Gap a little bit every night it's going to cool down and it's going to shrink and that is going to actually pull it open a little bit and same thing goes for moisture content and rain and weather and stuff like that so these logs are continuously moving right if that check is facing downward we don't worry about it right because water can't get up here and soak into it right right if it's a upward facing check like this where water can come down the face of the log and get into the log that's where we start to worry about it and that's one of the things actually it's a place that is often missed by many people who stain log homes uh or logs in general is they miss the inside of the check and there one opportunity to really protect that from moisture and water is by filling it up with stain making sure the entire inside is coated with stain so that it can resist moisture that makes sense if that doesn't happen I got examples right here's here's a nice upward facing check this was on a part of a deck water could run right down it right and you can see it goes right down into the center of the wood and starts to rot it out oh the outside of the log may look perfectly fine right right and in fact many times it does and so the customer doesn't even know that there is rot happening right worst is to have a solid color paint or stain on top of the surface because you can't see the water damage that's happening and you don't know when it's time to really go back in and re it more stain so you touched on a really good point now here because you said um you know solid color stains now I've I've been using solid color stains in uh Mountain environments on log homes on just homes in general and I think um the practice in general is uh you know painters homeowners doing your softwares they're going away from uh traditional like semi-transparent stains because there's so much maintenance and they're going to solid colors because they're less maintenance but apparently using what you just said using solid color stains is not good practice it isn't and it's not because the color on the surface doesn't last it does it actually lasts longer if it's a solid color but the homeowner doesn't have the the vision of What's Happen happening underneath that wood because invariably as that wood expands and attracts with the moisture and with the temperatures it's going to crack right the stain on the surface and that's going to allow moisture in and begin the Decay process inside the wood and what we'd rather have is have a semi-transparent stain on the surface uh where you can actually see that there's water damage starting to happen right and you go ah I don't want that it's time to put another maintenance coat of stain on there which will allow you to fill in all the little cracks and things like that that might start allowing water into the wood you know sasco they You full service do you guys provide stains you write cocking um chinking I think chinking is a big part of your business I mean um you know you would and me between the logs would you caul or that crack a great question and as as long as it's upward facing we would like to do something to seal it right right ideally you're going to fill it with stain first right you always stain before you you right because it's just much much easier and you get the benefit that the stain becomes kind of like a primer underneath the chinking so it sticks even better um but if the crack is a/ qu inch or larg that's when it becomes the size where you can squish the back of Rod back there and seal it up with with a soft elastic um jinking material or or something like conceal even log Builder they all kind of work that way okay this is another piece from a deck looks good on the outside right right you'd say that looks like a great piece of wood it does here's the interesting part notice the check was never sealed and yet on the inside it started to rot right that is really bad that's rotted really bad brought back yeah look at that you're like really scaring me with my log home that's not my intention I got to go home and jig my my intention is to educate right but you know that that's the name of the game we all get better as we learn and that's I would have never ever thought yeah I that's absolutely incredible we see this every day here we hear from contractors we hear from homeowners and they're experiencing these kinds of things all the time so this like I mean if this is the way this sits in order to have stop the rot back there this probably really should be sealed SE um um I don't think it's wide enough for back a rod but you would run um some like seal it like chinking or something you wouldn't actually put it on the inside you know squish it inside every wants to do that we all have tended to do that when we started out right but what happens is that log continues to move right and as it does it it winds up squishing up this tongue of sealant yeah that sticks out you seen it on H it sticks out and you're like that's not a good look look really ugly right um really small cracks are difficult to seal with a sealed right that's why we focus on the stain instead and if this had been saturated where you filled up that crack with stain when you were staining it right this would have been filled up with stain it would have been resistant to water to begin with as a small crack and then um if as time goes on eventually that crack got to be a little bit wider oh well now it would be time to throw in some backa rod and actually seal it up properly with some sealing so really you're going to have to come up with you know some method of like with if you're like spraying and back brushing you know taking your tip and spraying a ton of stained down in there um I mean is that what you're talking or is it you're that that is literally what we're talking about you we when we talk about the ideal way to spray a stain onto a log home and we don't care whose stain it is it could be doesn't have to be sasos it could be any stain you're putting on there we recommend using a sprayer with just the biggest tip you got okay it could be an old blown out tip from painting that you've used enough times and you're like find you're like this is a throwaway now actually no now it's a good stain right pump absolutely and it's not there to spray the stain onto the log it's there just to pump it onto the wall quickly so you can work with it back brush it and you let it literally run down the wall run down into these checks and cracks and start to fill them until it starts leaking out okay you know wher that stain is going to naturally run to that's also where water's going to go right so by doing it from the top down just letting it come down like that you're really yeah protecting the wood from wherever water would go into it it totally makes sense then we come back and we back brush this we go all right this is a mans siiz back brush there you go it looks like it's been used too it has this is what we call a block brush and this one is on a pole that's really useful espcially a lock home I would I would actually challenge you and say it's useful on painted homes too I use these on my own home painted right not a log home right we can't all but anyways um as a block brush though this is a a nice one it does doesn't fling back and forth much right it's thick it's short the cool thing about these is that I can reach far out and and far this direction from a ladder or from scaffolding I can work a large area pretty quickly so it's efficient work and I can also muscle the stain into the wood yeah cuz it's stiff enough Yeah the more you push the stain into the wood the better it's going to stick yeah in my first first 15 years as as just a paint chemist I'd look at back brushing and I would I would think about this right and I think oh I need to catch the drips okay well catching the drips is one thing and sort of spreading out the stain so it's even or the pain do even right that's one thing but that's not pushing the stain into the wood right with this one we can actually push the stain into the wood I think we call Force penetration yes of the yeah and there's a reason why we do that hold that one yeah we actually want to push the stain into the wood because uh of the actual structure of the wood within wood there are uh of course wood cells right you can think of them as a as a bundle of straws going up the up the tree right right um as this bundle of straws goes up the tree right of course water has to go from one wood cell into the next wood cell right right how does it do that there's a little structure called little structure shes called bordered pit paars and inside one cell wall there's an opening and it goes to a little cavity and then the next wood cell forms the other half of that clam shell right so it has its opening right and a little opening behind it so in between in between is this little space and there's an interesting structure called a Margo and a Taurus in there which is forms like a a flapper valve now that's total word nerd right right we're nerding out in you but if a wood cell gets injured by maybe a woodpecker or an insect or whatever else and the sap starts leaking out right right it's like a straw that's broken it's it's cracked right you can't suck through it anymore it loses its prime right what happens is the water in the wood cell flows out and it pushes on that flapper valve and it seals it that's that's why the flapper valves are in there huh so that that W that the rest of the tree can keep its prime and it doesn't die right self correcting cool well these border pit pairs are sitting in our wood so at the surface of the wood in every one of these wood cells there's just you know millions of these little border pairs in there right as we come along and we use a good block brush right and we lay down our stain or our paint if you don't touch it or you touch it very lightly what happens is it just lays down on top like that and it doesn't do anything it doesn't get into that into that uh bordered bit hair at all right right well if you come along and you brush it and you brush it hard with some force behind it you actually push it in and you squish stain into that border pit of air and it forms a solid little plug in there when it's dry it's like belg right it sticks in there really well and holds on to the wood mechanically that totally makes sense interesting that is very interesting way more wood wood nerdery than you would ever want to get into but it explains uh so it's interesting because there's there's a natural profile there waiting to be created by you back brushing it so by creating a profile by sanding a surface opening it up this is there opened up but it'll only be opened if you back brush it and force it down into that that is really I mean that totally makes sense why to back brush something and so it'll pretty it'll work okay but it'll work better if you if you back brush it yeah the only chance you have to back brush that was on Bearwood all right right if I'm doing recod on top of some old stain it's these are already blocked I'm only cover bring up other St so back brushing makes no difference once it's already been Co second coat doesn't matter so much then we second coat we can go back to the normal back brushing like I did as a paint Camas I'm catching drips I'm evening out the color whatever else that's fine but the first coat yeah I want to power it into so the first coat is really the most important coat so if you like my log home if you really want to get back you know and start over and do it properly you're going to blast it down to barewood however you're going to do that I got a wet media Blaster dry Blaster blasted down to barewood first coat back brush the heck out of that thing and then after that you can um add top coats over that and not have to back brush it with Force but just back brush to get rid of runs that's right cool yep that totally just that first coat you you want Power it into the wood if you can cool that's some good information absolutely love it so cool good to know