Wood fences in St. Bernard Parish don't fail all at once — they fade, then they soak. The first thing to check is whether water still beads on the boards. Flick a cup of water at a picket; if it darkens and disappears in seconds, the sealer is gone and the wood is drinking every rain. Silver-gray color on its own isn't rot, but it tells you the surface has been breaking down under UV long enough that the fibers are loose. Add the black speckling and green film that show up on the shaded north face and along the bottom rail, plus cupped or splitting boards, and you're looking at a fence that will start costing you pickets instead of a coat of stain.
Fence staining is maybe a third application and two thirds preparation, and the prep is where most jobs are won or lost. Repairs come first — loose pickets renailed or screwed, popped fasteners set, rotted boards swapped — because nobody wants to replace a board the week after it's been coated. Then the fence gets cleaned. A wood cleaner that lifts mildew and gray fiber does more for adhesion than pressure alone, and pressure is the part worth asking about: a tip held too close or a fan set too narrow carves grooves into the soft spring wood of pine and leaves a permanently furry surface that drinks stain unevenly. Cleaners that contain bleach often need a brightener afterward to bring the pH back down and the color back up, or the stain lands darker and blotchier than the sample.
Then the fence has to dry. This is the step the Gulf Coast punishes. In Chalmette humidity, a washed fence that looks dry on the surface can still be wet an eighth of an inch in, and stain applied over trapped moisture will blush, stay tacky, or lift in sheets by the next summer. A moisture meter settles it. The same logic applies to a brand-new fence: pressure-treated pine arrives wet with treatment chemicals and needs weeks of weather before it will take anything, while cypress and cedar can be sealed sooner but still want the mill glaze knocked off so the sealer penetrates instead of sitting on top.
Penetrating oil-based stains generally hold up better on fences here than thick film-forming products, because anything that forms a surface film has to contend with moisture pushing out from the back side of boards that are rained on from both directions and shaded by fig trees and neighbors' sheds. When a film-former fails, it fails by peeling, and the only fix is stripping or sanding — a far bigger job than recoating a penetrating stain. Transparency matters too: clear sealers protect against water but little against sun, semi-transparent gives you UV protection while still showing grain, and solid-body hides the most but behaves most like paint. More pigment usually means more years before the color goes.
Quotes vary mostly on linear footage, height, and how many sides get coated — a six-foot privacy fence stained on both faces is roughly double the surface of one face, and if your neighbor wants their side done, that's a conversation to have before the crew shows up. Style drives it as well: board-on-board and shadowbox have overlapping edges and gaps that a sprayer alone won't reach, spaced pickets mean coating edges and the rails behind them, and lattice toppers eat time. Condition is the other big lever. A fence that only needs washing is a different quote from one that needs a failed coating stripped, or one buried in confederate jasmine that has to be cut back and tied off first.
Ask what cleaner and what pressure they use, how they'll confirm the wood is dry before coating, which product line and transparency they're quoting, and whether they back-brush after spraying — spray alone lays stain on the surface, and brushing or rolling it in is what gets it into the grain. Ask how they'll protect siding, concrete, pool coping, cars, and plantings from overspray and drift, especially on narrow side yards in Arabi and Meraux where the fence sits a few feet off the house. Ask what the recoat interval looks like for the product on your exposure, since a west-facing run takes far more sun than a shaded back line.
Expect the work to be weather-driven. Staining needs a dry window before and after — rain on a fresh coat spots it — which makes summer afternoons unreliable and the drier stretches of spring and fall the easier booking. Plan on gates being unusable for a stretch, pets kept inside, and a day or more of cure before anything leans against the boards.