
If the water beads up on the surface, the wood is not dried out enough. Just pour a small amount of water onto the wood and watch what happens. How can you tell if the chemicals are fully dried out before painting pressure treated wood? There’s a simple test you can use. If your lumber is outside, wait at least a month after the last rain before painting. While you can handle new pressure treated boards without noticing the chemicals on your gloves, there is still moisture, pitch, and resin inside the wood which needs time to dry out before you paint it.ĭo your painting during warm, dry weather and low humidity conditions. Expect to wait three to four months for new pressure treated wood to completely cure before painting it. Unless you use kiln-dried pressure treated wood, one problem with putting a coat of paint on this type of wood is that pressure treated lumber is not thoroughly dry for quite a long time after the chemical pressure treatment.

Here are the steps to paint your lumber 1. Always use gloves when handling this type of wood, wash your hands after handling it, even when you use gloves, and use a dust mask when you saw or drill holes in pressure treated lumber. The chemicals used for pressure treating lumber are toxic if you ingest or inhale them. These help the chemicals penetrate better into the surface of the wood, and their presence is a sure way of determining a piece of wood has been pressure treated, no matter what the color is. If you look closely at the surface of pressure treated lumber, you will notice small indentations spaced over the board. The copper is what often gives pressure treated wood a slightly green tint, although the ACQ treatment makes the final product come out a brown color. However, building departments are phasing out CCA wood for residential use, so you are more likely to find it on existing structures. The most common are chromated copper arsenate, or CCA and alkaline copper quaternary, or ACQ. There are several different chemicals used for treating lumber. After that, the wood is set on racks until it is dry to the touch and ready for sale. When lumber is processed, it is submerged in a vat of chemicals and put under high pressure to get the chemicals to penetrate deeply into the wood grain.

Pressure treating wood is a process done at the lumber mill to make the wood more resistant to rot and fungus attack. Here are the steps to paint your lumber.
