The Rotting Deck Comes Down at the Hands of some Manly Men

OK, maybe that's an exaggeration. Although, we really didn't use much for tools! And I guess Ann did help a bunch. Anyway, let's talk about this deck.

We new it was rotting from underneath. The inspector told us that much after we bought that place last year. It was always hard to tell exactly how much if you're just standing on it or walking across it. The top boards always seemed steady and fine.

Well, Ann finally convinced me that we really should take advantage of the dumpster on site, the nice weather (50+ degrees late in Nov) and just get this done now. I relented and boy, was that the right decision.

I asked my dad to come help. He's sort of turned into my go-to guy for demo. Maybe it's a little low skilled for a skilled guy, but he does really like it.

We went at it, starting by pulling the top boards off. He was using a crowbar and they were coming off pretty easy. Frighteningly, I figured out pretty quick that I could simply grab one end of the board with my hands, lift up and pull the whole board off. These are long 15' boards nailed into the joists several times mind you. So, this wasn't just a couple spots that were going, but the whole support system.



Anyway, this was only a preview of things to come. Whoever built the deck laid a screen across the top of the joists, which you can see in the pic above. Maybe they anticipated a screened in porch someday. Instead, what this meant was that all the junk coming down from the trees didn't fall down to the ground, but got caught in that screen and just sat there wet, accelerating the rot.

As we pulled the top boards off and started to roll the screen back, we found all the support joists underneath to be even more rotten.



You can get a sense of how rotten this stuff was from the above. The only thing that really made us take out the tools were the joist hangers and the several nails going perpendicular to each other. Ah, nothing a crowbar or a 20# sledgehammer won't help take care of.

From here on out it was pretty must destroy and walk over to the bin. Having the bin right there was huge. It was so easy to just carry stuff in, beside not having to worry about dealing with getting it there and having it picked up myself. And at the end of the day, it was absolutely the right time to take the deck down. Now when spring comes, we can get right to building a new one. It may be a bit of an inconvenience for a couple months after moving in and not having anywhere to put the grill or the deck furniture, but hey, it'll be frigid and snowy anyway.