5 Different Lumber Sizes & How We Use Them || Dr Decks

[Music] hey guys dr dex here today i want to talk to you about five different types of lumber and how they're used in deck construction all right so a lot of you follow along and you watch our builds and you see different sizes and types of materials that we use so if you get something out of this video today or you like what you see don't forget to click that subscribe button and hit our bell icon if you want to be notified when we're putting out new content which is usually three days a week all right so probably the most common board that we use and the most is called a two by eight basically two by eight is a board that's been milled from a two by eight rough standard to down to an inch and a half by seven and a half sometimes the boards are seven and a quarter sometimes they're seven and three quarters it kind of depends on the the mill and they can vary throughout a unit most of these are pressure treated and that's mostly what i'm talking about today is going to be incised pressure treated hemlock all the boards i'm going to show you today are pressure treated in-sized hemlock boards that are made locally and they're available in our local market so what you see here this is this deck is framed in all two by eight joists so this ledger or this outside rim joist is a two by eight this joist all these joists are two by eight that's just one size of a material that we use and it's it's structural so we have to span it within a certain distance to make it that way so if we over span our joists it'll be too flexible and it won't pass code this deck's being permitted so we had to make sure that we have beam support in the proper locations for it and we're talking about beams that's another type of material that we use right here it's called a four by eight a four by eight again when they bring it from the mill it's a true four inch by eight inch and then they plane it down to three and a half inches wide by seven and a half inches tall like this okay then it gets in size and then it gets pressure treated so we have two by eight here we have four by eight here and four by eight is primarily used for beams we use 4x8 beams quite a bit because it's a good combination of thickness when you have a low deck and if you have at least 16 inches of space you can squeeze a 4x8 and a 2x8 into that space and you can run your joists over the top of your beams just like this okay and so that's that's basically one combination of framing that we use quite often is 80 i call it eight inch construction so it's a two by eight four by eight uh combination all right so what you see between these two by eights we have some pressure blocking and those are all done out of two by six two by six is just a smaller size of material that we use quite often the reason i use two by six i use a lot for pressure blocking the reason i like to use two by six for pressure blocking is because it sits below the level of a two by eight okay by a couple inches so we don't have any problems if we try to use all two by eight blocking we'd have to rip every single one of them down to make sure they're below the height of the joist or it gives us problems when we start to lay the deck boards down and we don't want to have to fiddle around with all that stuff when we're in a groove and we're just moving along and we're installing decking so 2x6 can also be used as joists but you can't span it very far i don't like using 2x6 for joists because it adds a lot of bounce into the deck so i primarily use two by six for blocking and flat blocking which we'll get into in a little bit another common use lumber that we use is called a four by six now four by six is three and a half by five and a half we use it for posts like in this portion of the deck right here so over here four by six i like using four by sixes better than four by four because they have a little bit more stoutness to them there's they don't crack as much they're a solid member so we'll use them for posts and we also use them for beams and one other thing we use them for is like when we're hanging our skirting down and we're connecting things to other things so let's go take a look at an example of that all right so here's another example of a 4x6 that we've used as a vertical element that we're going to use for skirting support for the deck we'll bring another board around the edge of this and will attach to this and it also has a little bit of structural value because it's sitting on top of this retaining wall and kind of holding up the end of the deck so we used uh four by six for posts and for beams and for vertical applications and then another piece of lumber that we use quite often and it's probably one of the more common ones it's called a four by four this is a four by four it's three and a half inches by three and a half inches square it is has a little bit less structural value than a four by six does but can be used in certain instances where we just need uh like a vertical element like this on some skirting or we use it quite often to fur things out if we need to uh or for vertical posts there's a lot of people that use them vertically for decks as well we prefer to use four by six but you know uh you can always check with a structural engineer if you're not sure which size member to use on any particular part of a build most of our decks are engineered and so we have the okay from our engineer to use the sizes of timber that we have included in our permit application all right guys thanks for watching today's video i hope a lot of you that don't know much about lumber or don't use lumber very often got something out of this video and if you did please click that subscribe button don't forget to share our videos with your friends and family and anybody that you know that might benefit from them don't forget to like our videos and please click that subscribe button it means so much to us thanks for watching guys have a great day [Music]

Channel: drdecks

Views: 1,662

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Dr decks, drdecks, deck building, custom decks, pacific northwest, carpentry, decks, deck, deck board bending

Id: 2hIoc-rrJYc

Length: 6min 5sec (365 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 06 2021