Not only does a log stain and finish define the aesthetic appeal of your log home, enhancing the striking beauty of the wood’s grain and natural color, but it serves as a shield for your home’s most precious building blocks – the logs. Because of this, it makes sense to spend the extra money upfront on a high-quality wood finish for your home that will protect the wood surface.

And, as it turns out, choosing a premium stain will save yourself oodles of cash over the lifetime of your log home.

How Premium Stains Are Cheaper Than Low-Cost Alternatives

The total cost for finishing your log home includes labor, tools and the materials involved in preparation of the wood surface, application of the finish and maintenance of that finish. When you consider the cost, it’s important to include the total long-term cost of the stain that you choose. There is not just one component to consider, nor one simple calculation to determine which stain is less expensive than the others.

To prove this point, the professionals in the industry performed a careful analysis that shows that in the long run, it’s actually less expensive to apply the best quality stain, despite its higher initial cost. Field tests show that while low quality wood finishes last two years or less, top quality 100-percent acrylic polymer finishes such as the Lifeline™ family from Perma-Chink Systems (PCS) last five years or more. Restaining every few years requires labor, and whether you perform the restaining yourself or hire an expert applicator, it comes at a cost. A DIY project could require renting equipment (sprayer, scaffolding, etc.) and spending time prepping the surface, applying the stain and topcoat, and clean-up after the project. 

To illustrate this idea, let's look at an example.

For an average-size log home, let's take a standard labor cost for finishing of about $4,500 (labor rates vary across markets). In addition, about 20 gallons of stain would be needed to apply two coats to the home. For an ordinary stain from a typical big box home improvement store, let’s say the cost per gallon is around $45, totaling $900 for the entire job (we'll ignore taxes for simplicity). Add in $4,500 for labor, and the total cost of the job is $5,400.

Field tests show that the job will last two years, the cost per year of service would be $2,700 ($5400 / 2 years).

Now let’s take a look at the cost of Ultra-2, our premium 2-coat wood stain. At a cost of somewhere around $116 per gallon, the cost for 20 gallons would be $2,320. Again, the labor would be $4,500, so the total would be $6,820 – a significant increase compared to the lower-priced product.

However, the stain will last at least five years, which lowers the cost per year of service to $1,364 – less than half the yearly cost of the “budget” stain job! Imagine the savings over an even longer period of time – say ten years.

Do Premium Finishes Cover Less than Cheaper Finishes?

Our example above does omit one aspect of stains - the coverage rate. Every manufacturer has a different rate for their stains. They can range between 150sqft and 400sqft of coverage per gallon, depending on wood porosity and which stain coat is applied. By comparison, Ultra-2 has a coverage rate between 350sqft–450sqft per gallon for a first coat and 600sqft–800sqft per gallon for a second coat. That is roughly double the coverage of other stains. Not only do PCS stains last longer, but they go further than others on the market. 

Premium Products Come With Expert Support

PCS offers the best product support in the business, leading the way with free samples (not color chips!) and free customer support. Our Customer Service Representatives deal exclusively with the log and timber home industry and are happy to answer any question regarding wood care. PCS is focused on this niche; we're not splitting attention to a catalog of thousand different house paint colors, or selling applicances alongside our stains and sealants. Wood care is our sole business, and our customer support is second to none.

PCS is committed to being accessible to customers, with real people staffing phones, chat, and email accounts. We use no automated bots, AI filtering, or complex phone menu when customers reach out for assistance. 

We will be with you every step of the way, and have the resources to back that up. For five decades PCS has cared for log and timber homes. We've done a fantastic job maintaining our records, so for many homes, we can dig a little through our system and find the historical product usage for a customer's home. If a customer has recently bought a log home and is unsure of what products are on the home, if the previous owner used PCS products, it's very possible we'll have that information. 

Choosing a Premium Stain is the Right Thing to Do

It’s no surprise that high-quality products from PCS’ extensive collection of exterior finishes and stains will result in spending less time and money protecting and maintaining your log home over the years. With a longer-lasting finish that saves you time on refinishing projects and a higher coverage rate that goes further than the "competition," our stains and finishes are the best options on the market. Yes, the initial cost is more than a big-box product. But doing the math in total project cost, PCS' unmatched stains and topcoats will produce a greater value to log and timber homeowners. The best is worth it.

You will be amazed at how PCS' premium stains and finishes highlight the natural wood grain, keeping your home looking beautiful over the long term with easy maintenance and fewer restaining projects.