How to Treat Your Timber Garden Building and Ensure Longevity
At Tuin, we’re proud to offer a 10-year guarantee on our timber garden buildings, including our popular log cabins, summerhouses and gazebos. We can offer this long-lasting guarantee due to the quality of our slow-grown spruce timber. However, this guarantee is only valid if the wood is properly and regularly treated.
So, we’re here to help you ensure your garden building gets the treatment it needs and help you to keep your garden building looking its best and protect your guarantee.
Why does timber treatment matter?
Our garden buildings are supplied to you untreated so you can finish your chosen model to suit your tastes and garden décor. It’s important to treat the wood as soon as the building has been constructed and at regular intervals to protect your building and maintain both its look and to weatherproof the building. Your garden building will not be watertight until it’s been treated.
Wood is a living material which means it breathes and reacts to its environment. While our buildings are made from slow-grown, high-quality spruce wood, even the best timber needs protection.
Untreated or poorly maintained timber is vulnerable to:
Discolouration
Wood warping and shrinkage
Expansion
Water marks appearing internally
Insect attacks
UV light
Weather ingress
Think of wood treatment as a protective jacket for your wooden garden building. Without it, the timber is exposed to the full force of the elements.
When should the timber be treated?
We recommend treating your garden building ideally within seven days of installation but for us to guarantee the timber, you must have treated the wood within one month of it being built. A fresh coat will need to be applied at least once every year after this.
Always ensure the timber is dry before you apply any treatments (below 18% moisture content is ideal). Remember that even if your building is pressure-treated, it will still need a weather-proof topcoat to protect it from UV rays and water ingress.
What treatment should you use?
To protect your timber building in the best possible way, we recommend using a waterproof (sometimes referred to as weatherproof) treatment on all exposed surfaces including window and door frame interiors. We do not recommend using water resistant treatments as these can sometimes trap moisture which can accelerate decay in the wood.
Water based coatings such as our Carefree Protectant Timber Treatment are perfect for treating your timber garden building and four coats of the treatment will provide protection for 1-2 years.
If you can evidence that your Tuin garden building has been protected with a treatment every year, we will guarantee the wood.
For more information about the Tuin 10-year guarantee, read our guarantee page: https://www.tuin.co.uk/tuin-uk-guarantee/