When people start stepping through rotted deck boards, you know it’s time do do something. Before I moved in, the previous solution had been to replace deck boards with cedar planks on an individual basis. This was fine for a while, but not a long term solution, and with a party coming up in a few months it was essential that I solve the problem in a more enduring way. We liked the existing deck design, so we wanted to just upgrade the top surface. However, we didn’t know the state of the joists underneath, so there was a bit of a mystery about the scope of the project. We decided that we wanted to do picture framing on the new surface, and go with composite decking material. There was weeks of agonizing over which material and finish, and ultimately we decided on an unclad composite. It was cheaper, but that’s not why we chose it. It just looked more like natural wood. I used the Menard’s deck building tool and then checked its calculations and ordered material. I had moved out of the Concord house by this point, but still had some larger furniture there, so on one weekend I did demolition of the deck boards and got an idea of what I needed for the deck structure, then rented a U-Haul and used it to pick up and move the furniture to the house, then go to Menard’s and pick up the materials needed. I did all of this alone and during one of the hottest days of summer. I looked dead by the time I was done with the U-Haul.
Removing the deck boards was pretty easy. They were screwed in, and where I couldn’t remove the screws I could just rip out the board and remove the screws with a hammer against their side, shearing them where they had rusted at the joist. The next part was excruciating, though. The joists were on 16″ spacing, but with diagonal boards you need 12″. The previous decking was done improperly, and with the upgraded deck I wanted to do it right, so I had to remove all of the old joists and respace them with additional new joists mixed in. This took multiple days because it was so hot out I could only work a few hours at a time, and my back was in excruciating pain from bending over all day.
Next was blocking. Picture framing requires additional blocking so that there is a place for the ends of the boards to attach, so I had to cut and insert a lot of boards, all of which were difficult to hammer in place because of the 12″ spacing. It was all terrible.
The bottom stair was an interesting challenge. I was using invisible fasteners, which meant I couldn’t screw the deck boards on from above; they had to be screwed on from underneath. But the bottom step had no access. So I had to build a box separately, put the deck boards on it, stick lag bolts through the backs of the steps, and then slide them into the deck and tighten the bolts before I could put the deck boards on and lose access. It was complicated and finicky, but I got it to work.
Before putting the deck boards on, I also had to put black weatherproof tape on top of all the joists so they wouldn’t rot. The previous structure had done a decent job of resisting rot, though some of the posts had lost some integrity. I just ignored that and the fact that there didn’t appear to be any concrete and the posts were just embedded into the ground. The whole deck is at most 18″ from surface to ground, so it’s not like there’s any safety hazard.
With the frame finally complete, I was ready to install the deck boards. I did some of the picture frame boards, then the internal boards, then cut straight lines on the far sides of the deck so there would be room to complete the picture framing. This way I didn’t need to cut each diagonal board to an exact length and could just cut a 45 degree cut in one side, put it in place, snap a line across the whole deck, and make a single nice long cut for the final picture frame board. It worked ok.
The project ended up taking over a month with me working a few hours most days. It was way more than the week of work that I anticipated, and I was pretty frustrated that it was occupying so much of my life. But once it was complete it looked amazing and it was done a couple weeks before the fist big party where everybody could try it out and marvel at it. Total cost was $4600, and it should last a long time.
