Things to think about when replacing parts of your deck

What You'll Find When You Peel Back the Layers

We recently replaced the posts on a big deck in Coronado. There were some things we came across that I felt could be a good learning opportunity for someone thinking about replacing portions of an exterior wood structure.

1) Painting/ Sealing the wood is an afterthought for most builders. They build first, paint later. Problem with this is all your wood-to-wood connections (like where your posts connect with the deck structure) will trap water and deteriorate much faster.

2) Spot repairs need to be done correctly, or they could speed up the deterioration. This deck was made of very beefy 6x12 joists on the outside, so it wasn't a big deal, but someone had stuff paper in prior wood rot then used wood filler over the top. We dug out the space in the beam, scabbed in a piece of 2x12 to fill the hole, then bondo-ed around the edges to seal it.

3) That picture of that scarf jointed beam was gnarly. Haven't seen that before but looks like they were running short on their beams and didn't want to buy more. Not sure what they were thinking there but that could have been dangerous. We fixed it by using a piece of lumber scabbed over the top with 4 thick carriage bolts but ... damn.

4) Watch for corrosion around your footers. These tilers didn't want to remove any of the wood to tile under the footer trim pieces. They almost caused the whole thing to fail. Water was just sitting around the connection to the ground. Fortunately, this thing was build with very thick framing so it was able to withstand it.

5) It's going to take longer to repair than what you think. These were just some of the things that extended the time. We built in a little contingency time into our bid, so we were able to take care of these items without having to constantly go back to our client and ask for more money. On projects like this keep in mind it never goes off without fun discoveries, so the bid is going to be higher than you probably expect. That being said, the end product will be awesome, long lasting and ... SAFE. That's what's really important.