At the end of last Summer, I decided that the top of the deck in our backyard needed to be replaced. After years of neglect, and some patchwork, it was time to tear it down and replace it. I was thinking that I should be able to pay someone to do this; as far I knew at the time there were just 28 deck boards that needed to be removed and replaced with 28 new boards. I think I paid less than $2,000 to have the whole thing built from scratch, but that was quite a few years ago.
I called the company who originally built the deck for me, and they came out to look, gave me an estimate of over $5,000 for replacing the top boards, and said that anything they found underneath that needed to be replaced would be extra. Anyone who knows me, knows that I have no problem paying people to do stuff, but I thought that was pretty steep given the scope of what (I thought at the time) needed to be done, so I got another estimate. The next estimate was a little bit higher than the first one, and the second guy was trying to sell me some “special” stain or something too, which I thought was kind of annoying. It was at that point that I decided that I would cosplay a carpenter.
Once I started tearing the top boards off, I quickly realized that this was going to be a bigger job. Many of the joists were rotting and no longer structurally sound. Once I figured out the size of all of the boards I would need to replace, off to Lowe’s I went. The price of the boards, the joist tape, the screws, and a couple of other things I needed came out to a little over $700. So, this was going to cost me $700 plus my blood, sweat, and tears instead over $5,000, and I was going to learn some things along the way (whether I liked it or not).
As I was working through this, eventually I came up with routines or systems for doing each part of it. The old joists were incredibly difficult to remove at first. The plan was to remove the old wood from the hangers and just the drop the new joists into those already existing and leveled hangers. I couldn’t get those out! All of the galvanized steel and nails were too difficult to remove, so I ended up having to cut the joists out and hammer the old hangers off. I also had a lot of issues with the screws that held the decking down. Many of them were rusty and stripped easily. There was a lot more prying and sledgehammering than I originally envisioned.
I replaced everything with the mindset that I may have to do it again at some point while also really hoping not to, so I used stainless steel screws instead of galvanized nails, replaced joists that probably could have been re-used, etc. The new screws are very difficult to strip, and a lot better quality than the screws that were used before. Future me will thank me.
Overall, this took a lot longer than I hoped it would, but in the end, I do think it came out good considering who did it. I definitely have a great deal of respect for people who do this type of work for a living.