#383...ipe going gray

When we built our cabana a few years ago, we loved the dark look of the freshly oiled Ipe wood. We thought we could maintain this look, and our cabana Ipe would look as good as this Ipe deck does (pulled off Houzz) forever.

But alas, we can not keep up the rigorous maintenance schedule to keep the Ipe looking like this. So, we have decided to let our Ipe go gray, hoping it will look like this someday.

This picture above is still in the process of graying I suspect. If left untreated Ipe will weather to a silvery gray color. Since we had once oiled our wood, it had weathered to kind of a dingy reddish brown color. We decided to sand off the top layer of the old oil to help let the Ipe gray. Tyler did all the dirty work on this project.

Above you can see the previous layer of remaining oil to the right of the orbital where he had yet to sand.

Above he had finished sanding the lower deck and pool facing, but had yet to sand the roof pergola facing. Below is the finished sanded Ipe. We are super excited for our wood to gray and to be maintenance free.