Start by cleaning and prepping the wooden playset for staining. Begin by power washing the entire playset to remove built up dirt and grime. You can do this the weekend before staining so that the wood has the entire week to fully dry.

Next, remove any decoration or part of the structure that you don’t wait stained. This can include the playset swings, faux “rocks” if your playset has a rock wall, and bolt coverings. You should also cover things that can’t be easily removed such as the brackets or accents like a steering wheel, telescope and slide.

Sand the entire playset to give the fresh coat of stain a better surface to adhere to. This will also help remove any old, worn pieces of wood that might cause splinters. Focus on the main areas that kids are going to be touching and climbing such as the railings and climbing wall.

Now you’re ready for the fun part: Staining the playset! We recommend using a FLEXiO paint sprayer for this project, which will make it easy to spray the entire structure in a fraction of the time it’d take with a brush. The FLEXiO sprayers can easily spray thick latex materials and solid stains so for this particular playset we chose to use Behr solid stain in the color Tugboat.

Depending on the age and condition of the wood, you might need to apply multiple coats. This playset hadn’t been stained in several years (10+) and had endured three different homeowners (and three sets of kids!). Since it was so old, the wood was very thirsty and soaked up about 2 gallons of stain.

Allow the stain to dry per the manufacturer’s instructions. Once the stain had dried, remove all of the coverings from the slide and brackets, rehang the swings, put the rocks back on the rock wall and replace the bolt covers.

Now you have a “like new” swing set to play on all summer long! The playset is ready to withstand any type of weather (or child!) that comes its way.