Oliver Log Home Restoration: Peeling Stain, Stripped Back to Bare Wood

If your log home’s finish has started to peel and flake, you already know the feeling — you can touch it up all you want, and it just keeps lifting. This home in Oliver, BC had reached that exact point: the old stain was peeling and flaking off the logs, and patching it was never going to hold. When a finish gets to that stage, the only real answer is to take it all the way back to bare wood and start fresh. Here’s how the project came together.

The Project: A Log Home in Oliver, BC

This home sits in Oliver, in the South Okanagan. It’s a well-built log home that had simply gone too long on an aging finish — the kind of job Frontier travels for right across British Columbia and beyond. The logs were sound; the finish protecting them was not.

The Problem: Oil-Based Stain That Was Peeling and Flaking

The home had several coats of an oil-based stain on it, and that stain was peeling and flaking off the logs. Once a surface finish starts to lift like that, it has lost its bond with the wood — and re-coating over failing stain just traps the problem underneath and buys a season, not a solution. The durable fix is to remove the old finish entirely, every coat, and get back to sound, bare wood. That was the plan here.

Media Blasting Back to Bare Wood

To strip the old stain, the crew used media blasting rather than chemical strippers or sanding the whole home down.

Frontier’s media blasting uses crushed-glass media — recycled glass that’s 100% silica-free. It cuts through several coats of old, peeling finish without the toxic runoff of chemical stripping, and the spent media simply dissipates back into the soil. Every log on the home came back to clean, raw wood, ready to take a fresh finish.

Four Coats of Sikkens 078

With the logs stripped clean, the crew refinished the home with four coats of Sikkens 078. Sikkens 078 is a translucent, high-performance exterior finish made specifically for log homes — its iron-oxide pigments and UV absorbers guard the wood against the sun that grays and breaks down unprotected logs. Four coats build that protection up with real depth, and bring the logs back to a warm, rich finish that lets the grain show through.

Why This Approach Lasts

The logic is the same on every log home we restore: strip the failed finish all the way back, get down to sound bare wood, prep it properly, and rebuild with a finish made for logs. A UV-protective finish stands up to the sun exposure that wears these homes down in the first place — and that’s what keeps a home looking its best for years, instead of peeling again in a season or two. It’s more work than brushing a fresh coat over old stain, but on a home whose finish had already started to fail, doing it right was the only way that lasts.

Have a Log Home With a Finish That’s Starting to Peel?

A peeling, flaking finish is a fixable problem — this Oliver home is proof of what one looks like brought all the way back. Whether your log home is in the Okanagan, elsewhere in British Columbia, or across the country, Frontier travels to you. We’ve spent 25+ years taking log homes back from bare wood up — media blasting, prep, and staining, all handled in-house by our own crew.

If your logs are peeling or flaking, get a free quote — and we’ll walk you through exactly what your home needs to have it done right the first time.