New decks

The Florida sun, rain and humidity are all tough on exterior decks. An inexpensive wood deck built just 10 years ago has probably reached the end of its useful life. Portions of the structure may still look fine but danger lurks within! Construction materials and techniques have come a long way in the past 10 years. Decks use to be nailed to the house, fastened with galvanized nails and sometimes inadequately framed. Almost all decks were finished with pressure treated pine. Today we know better.

The decks we build today are bolted to the house with galvanized or stainless bolts and nuts. We use only stainless steel nails, screws and hardware. We over frame the structure and have more options available for decking. We still use pressure treated wood on occasion but the new chemicals used to treat the wood are friendlier and safer. We also use tropical hardwoods like ipe, mahogany or macaranduba, woods which will look good and have a life double or triple that of pressure treated pine. We can also use one of the many composite products like Trex, Correct Deck or Evergrain.

An old deck can be an unsafe deck. Often the damage is where you can't see it but the dangers of an old deck collapsing are very real, Chicago deck collapse, or Maryland deck collapse. This picture is of a small deck we just rebuilt. The owners had no idea that the deck was rotting away inside.

This type damage is commonplace, we see it in almost every deck we rebuild. This joist was covered with a band board. The two boards sandwiched together allowed water to seep in between and rot them from the inside out.
Here's the bottom of the stair stringer on the same deck.

The stair treads were just as bad and certainly not safe to walk on.

This is a rusted away joist hanger/hurricane clip. This is what holds the structure of a deck together but you can see that there was nothing left to hold anything together here. These are under the deck, out of sight and out of mind but are obviously very important to the safety of
any deck.

Here's another deck we rebuilt shortly after Hurricane Charlie. We originally were going to replace the badly damaged pressure treated deck boards. When we started pulling the old boards off portions of the deck simply collapsed. In this photo you can see that the deck boards fell in opposite directions. The structural joists that should have provided support on either side were entirely rotted away.

We rebuilt most of the structural components, added new concrete piers and installed Trex decking with stainless steel screws. This deck is now attractive and most of all it's safe.


Call and schedule an appointment to have your deck inspected. We'll be glad to tell you if it's unsafe and you already know if it's unsightly!

Side door of your garage

Take a good look at the exterior door on your garage. If it's like most others here in south Florida the bottom of the door jambs are going to have decay. In some cases that decay will still be in the early stages and only show as a discoloration on the bottom six inches of the jambs. On most you will have active rot and will be able to stick your finger right into the wood of the jamb. In all likelihood the rot will also have extended to the bottom corner of the door on the hinge side. If your house was built in the past 20 years the door will probably be steel and you'll have rot and rust! While you're there notice that your hinges are rusted and look nasty and the lock and deadbolt hardly work at all. Most people use these doors so infrequently that they don't notice the damage at all until the day the door won't close or the lock won't lock. This happens because the doors were installed without being painted first. A coat of primer and some topcoat on the bottom and top of these doors would go a long way toward making them last. Unfortunately the carpenters didn't paint and the painters rarely removed exterior doors to paint the bottoms.

You may be wondering why you should be concerned with a door you rarely use or see. What you can't see is that in all likelihood your door is held in the rough opening with 6 or 8 nails. They may be just as rusty as the hinges and have lost most of their holding power. In a hurricane strong winds and suction could rip your door off it's hinges or even rip the whole assembly out of the rough opening. Losing a door or window allows hurricane force winds into your house which pushes up on your roof and there goes your house.

Trying to repair what's there is a waste of time and money. We can repair the wood jambs with epoxies, replace the hinges and install new locksets but those repairs rarely last long, never look good and aren't cost effective.

Technology may seem like a strange word to use in relation to carpentry but it's not. There are all sorts of high tech products out there now that are used for making doors, jambs, hinges etc., that won't rot or rust. We use storm rated fiberglass doors with PVC interiors, PVC jambs and stainless steel hinges. Unlike wood fiberglass won't rot, unlike steel it won't rust. Since moisture can't get behind it a good paint job can last 10 years or more. PVC jambs are made of the same material that your plumbing pipes are so obviously water won't hurt them and stainless hinges and screws won't rust and corrode. If you go ahead and install a quality stainless lockset you'll have a door that won't need any anymore than cosmetic maintenance for years to come. Before we install a new door we fasten the wood bucks to the concrete block with about 24 concrete screws. Once we have the bucks secure we install the jambs to the bucks with about 24 stainless steel screws. Once we have the door installed in the jambs and everything is working properly we spray polyurethane foam in the gap between the buck and jamb. The foam is not only an air barrier but also a super strong adhesive that glues the block, bucks and jambs together. Now you have a door assembly that isn't going to fail during a hurricane.

Save the whales!

A Whale of a Tail

I worked my first construction job on Sanibel island back in 1973 as a carpenter on a house off Dixie Beach Parkway. Since then I’ve done just about every construction job imaginable on various Sanibel homes. Our speciality is rot repair but we’ve replaced doors and windows, remodeled kitchens, built decks and rails, painted, and after hurricanes Charlie and Wilma spent over 18 months just repairing wind and rain damage. In other words if you had asked I would have said we had done it all. Be careful what you say!

My company, Foy R Parker Building Contractor has done maintenance and repair work for Brenda Roguska at Sanibel One Realty for many years now and we’ve worked on the same houses many times. One house in particular is a nice, older beachfront home on West Gulf Drive called Whale House. To emphasize the name or maybe the origin of the name, there has always been a large carved wood sculpture of a female gray whale with calf in the yard facing the ocean. Other than noting it’s existence I had paid little attention to it until about 4 years ago when I realized it seemed to be missing. On further investigation I found the whale totally overgrown with shrubs. Curious, I forced my way through the bushes to take a good look and discovered that the sculpture was badly rotted and part of the tail had fallen off. We cleared a path through the bushes, got the sculpture off it’s base and moved it under the house so it would be protected from the weather. I told Brenda what we had done and moved on to other matters. About a year later I was back at the house and noticed that the whale was still lying there. I mentioned it again to Brenda who told me that the home owners were anxious to have the whale repaired but that she hadn’t been able to find anyone to do the work. Rotten wood is right up my company’s alley and since I am always up for something new I told her we might be able to make the repairs. Never having done anything resembling this I knew it was a gamble but I figured we couldn’t do much more damage than had already been done.

We loaded the ten foot long sculpture in the truck and took it to my house where I could study it we could work on it at our own pace. We started with a chainsaw to cut out all the rot, and cut and cut and cut. It seemed the rot would never end. When we were done I was appalled, as there seemed to be as much air as wood. One eye and half the mouth were missing, the mother whale had a hole four feet long and nearly a foot wide all the way through her body while the calf had a four inch by three foot slot across it’s back and of course there was the missing tail. We coated what was left with a wood consolidant and threw a tarp over it. I think we realized at that point that repairing the whales was going to be a much bigger job than we had anticipated.

The whales sat in my yard for months, in fact they moved to a new home with me where I kept them covered by the tarp and did my best to avoid thinking about them. My wife kept asking me when I was going to get the whales out of the yard. The truth was that we aren't wood carvers and I was scared to start, the whale’s bodies were bad enough but the double tail kept me up nights. After about a year of seasoning in my yard Brenda called to let me know that the owners of Whale House were going to be arriving for a one week stay in two short months and were anxious to see the finished whales. Nothing like a little pressure for motivation. I ordered a large quantity of epoxies, polyurethane glue, rubber gloves and a pile of lumber. While I’m generally not a fan of cedar I choose it since it’s easily worked and it would all be covered with a very waterproof high tech coating anyway. We started gluing and stacking boards and filling the holes.

Bottom of the whale

Each board had to be cut and carved to fit the very irregular hole the chain saw had made. One board at a time we filled and glued until the holes started to fill.

Top of the whales

We finally had the body cavities solid again and could turn our attention to sawing, grinding, filing and sanding the new wood to make it look like a whale. Since there were some of the original profile to work from that part went by fairly quickly. Carving the eye and mouth caused some stress but by referring to the existing eye and mouth we muddled through. Then we had to finally face the dreaded tail. Once again we stacked and glued cedar until we thought we had enough wood that the tail could be carved out of it.

The start of the whale’s new tail

That of course this was the easy part. Up to this point it was just like replacing rotten wood on a house with some curves but now we had to cut away everything that didn’t look like a whale’s tail. Al Hassie, Ron Fisher and I spent the next few hours shaping, carving and refining until it really did look like a whale’s tail again. We gave the whole thing a good sanding and then applied the first of 4 coats of a high tech polyurethane coating that looks and feels like what I imagine a whale’s skin really feels like. Not only does it look good but hopefully it will protect the whales for many years to come.

Gray base coat

Each coat had to dry for 24 hours so it took 3 days for all three coats of the base to be applied. In the meantime Brenda was calling me every day to remind me of the owner’s imminent arrival on Saturday.

Thursday was spent creating a new base for the whales since the original base was simply a section of tree trunk that was now totally rotten. I decided that something nautical was needed and what better than a dolphin. The dolphin I had in mind wasn’t the marine animal but a group of wood pilings used as bumpers in ship’s channels all over the world. We used treated fence posts trying to keep the proportions right.

Friday we carefully loaded the whales and parts for the base and headed for Sanibel. We sank the middle post of our new base into the ground four feet and bolted the other posts to it and each other. Giving the posts a few wraps with galvanized cable gave it the right look and the base was done. We carried the whales around the house and fastened them on their new base facing the sea. All that was needed was the final coat of black polymer and the whales were finished. After a 4 year journey the whales of Whale House were home and with hours to spare!

Completed whales back at home

The owners were very pleased and I was happy and relieved. The whales had been saved and we had successfully completed our most unique job ever. By the way, the whale’s tails turned out perfect!