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!