How do you re-stain a recently stained deck?

Question

My husband and I stained our deck yesterday and unfortunately the color is a lot lighter than we anticipated. Our deck was originally painted with latex paint so we had to strip the deck to get the paint off before we stained which consisted of a deck stripper, power washing and a lot of peeling and scraping (we had a painter helping us with the project). Our painter friend lives out of town so we are now on our own. We just want to know if we can go over the stain with a darker stain. We used a solid stain and our friend sprayed it on. Any help would be greatly appreciated!! I am sick about it because we put so much work into it and hope we can just go over it since it has only been on for a day!!

Answer 1

If you have any of the stain that you used on the first coat left, apply some to a scrap piece of timber (preferably the same type as the decking timber, but wont matter too much). Take this into your paint supplier, they should let you use just a little bit of a darker stain to apply to your sample piece and see if you like the colour.

If you use the same brand of stain, it will go over your first coat without any probs.

You may also find that a second coat of the stain that you used the first time will give you the right colour.