Cedar asks for a day every five summers. Composite asks for nothing but rain. Both end up in the skip eight years early when nobody answers — this is the shop that answers.
Services & rates
The care card, 2026 season
Per running foot, both sides, materials and clean-up inside every number. Posts below the frost line never ask for our help — the boards do, every four to six years, and the wash-day visit writes the fixed number before the first drop cloth goes down.
Soft wash & brighten, cedarfrom $2.40/ln ft
percarbonate wash, oxalic brighten, both sides
Semi-transparent oil stain, cedarfrom $4.10/ln ft
brush-applied, two sides, back-brushed
The full renewal — wash, brighten, stainfrom $5.90/ln ft
the ten-years-younger package
Composite line, washed & sealedfrom $2.90/ln ft
the no-sanding special
Strip & re-stain, failed coatingfrom $7.80/ln ft
when the previous product flakes
Mildew treatment, shaded linesfrom $1.60/ln ft
the north-face protocol
The twenty-year arithmetic
Cedar asks. Composite doesn’t. Both cost.
One hundred feet of six-foot fence, priced honestly over twenty years — installed once, then maintained or not. Cedar with a stain every fifth summer lands within a coat of composite that never asks, and neither deserves the skip that waiting buys. We will wash and feed whichever one you own, and quote the other without a hard sell.
One hundred feet, twenty years
Cedar, installed + stained every fifth summer≈ $7,600
at our care-card rates, both sides
Composite, installed + rained on≈ $4,400
the no-Saturday line
Cedar, installed + left to silver≈ $3,400
warp-free if the framing was honest
Either, replaced once at year twelve≈ $9,000
the skip that didn’t need to happen
How the renewal goes
One dry weekend, four passes
The whole system is built around the grain: what opens it, what closes it, and the moisture window when the oil can be welcomed into it. No pressure, no shortcuts, no stain on the rhododendrons.
The soft wash
A percarbonate solution at garden-hose pressure — never above six hundred psi, because pressure is what turns a cedar board into pulp furniture. The grey lifts; the grain stays.
The brighten
Oxalic acid, the same brightener a floor finisher uses, pumped on and rinsed off. The grey-green of weathered tannin lifts and the board comes back the colour it was the year it was hung.
The dry window
A moisture meter at three boards, and we wait for the reading the oil asks for. Stain over damp cedar is a film, and film is what flakes — the meter, not the calendar, decides the day.
The oil
Semi-transparent, brushed and back-brushed on both sides while the neighbour’s sprinkler is negotiated with. It feeds the grain rather than painting over it, which is why it wears out honestly in year five instead of flaking in year two.
Birchwater · Mossgrove · 2025–2026
Before, and one week after
Six lines from last season, photographed at the same post, one week apart. The camera is the argument — every fence here looked like the left side of its own photograph once.
The neighbour stopped his truck, got out, and asked when we had the new fence installed. Same fence, twelve years old, one Saturday of Longgrain — washed, brightened and fed the colour it was hung with. My husband didn’t correct him for a week, because honestly, neither did I.
Proof
The street notices
Three from the seasons of thank-you cards — the cards come with the honey harvest of fence care: the second season.
The listing photographs went from “charming boundary” to “new fence” between the wash and the stain, and the buyer’s inspector noted the fence as an asset rather than a countdown. The oil cost a fifth of what replacing the line would have, and the colour still reads two springs later.
I asked them to pressure wash it properly — hard, like the driveway — and they talked me out of my own instruction with a board from their van and sixty seconds. What came back instead was the colour of the fence we paid for in 2011, without a single scar on the grain.
The composite myth is that it needs nothing — ours had a grey film and a patch of mildew the sales rep said was impossible. Longgrain washed it, sealed it, and told me which cleaner to buy for the spots myself rather than selling me a standing contract. That kind of honest buys the street.
Before the bucket
The care questions
What every cedar owner in Birchwater asks when the grey starts winning — answered by the people whose whole business is the answer.
Why is my cedar grey?
Ultraviolet light eats the lignin that carries the colour, and rain rinses the wreckage out — the silver is the scar tissue. It is honest weathering, not rot, and the brightener reverses it in an afternoon if the boards are sound underneath, which the wash tells us before anything else.
Why won’t you pressure wash it properly?
Because above about six hundred psi, water cuts cedar fibres instead of lifting dirt — the fence goes clean, fuzzy and thirsty, and every fuzzy board drinks stain unevenly for the rest of its life. The soft wash takes two hours longer and costs the fence ten years. We know which trade-off we are selling.
Can you stain my composite fence?
Not honestly — pigment sits on the surface of composite instead of soaking in, and it peels within two seasons. What composite does accept is the wash-and-seal: the grey film lifts, the mildew dies, and the sealer slows the film from coming back. That is the service we sell, and no more.
When should a new cedar fence first be stained?
After one full season — six to twelve months, when the mill glaze has weathered off and the moisture reading has settled. Staining new cedar in month one is painting plastic, and the outfit that recommends it is selling stain, not care.
The spring list opens in March and Birchwater’s dry weekends are countable — book the wash-day visit now · (555) 189-6642 · stain@longgraincare.example
Send the photograph of the line.
One photograph in daylight, and we will say what the line needs — wash, brighten, feed, or nothing — with a fixed number back inside two business days. Birchwater, Mossgrove and twenty miles around.