You won’t be staining (great!) So what are your goals? Do you like the fresh wood color of the covered area or do you like the softer grey of the stairs.

Flexible. The covered deck will never grey from what we can tell as it’s 4.5 years later and hasn’t happened. Stairs being grey is fine. Cedar fence also grey. Goal is easy to care for. We don’t mind spurn the cleaning yearly now that we have a better plan on what needs to be done

Hi WCH, what did you end up doing? We're on the west coast too and have given up on staining our deck. Thank you!