5 Tips for Building a Durable Deck

on the bill chair today we're talking Dec framing I've got five tips for you to build a really durable deck that's gonna last for at least a generation or two let's get going on the build show today we're talking deck framing five tips for building a really durable deck now this is the first in a series of deck videos but this is the important foundation for your deck it doesn't matter what deck board you use if the foundation the framing everything below that isn't right you've got a deck that's gonna fail prematurely so first off we want to say a big thanks to our friends at timber town that's my local dealer where I bought my deck supplies and yellow wood for sponsoring today's video now there's three things that kill most decks and give them a premature death number one water number two water and number three water as my friend David says if it can't dry it's gonna die and you're gonna see that theme on all five of these tips today so let's get going number one we want to choose our lumber carefully now our pressure treated lumber on this job is all yellow wood our friends at timber town sale yellow wood and they only sell ground contact yellow wood now let's talk about this for a minute there's lots of different grades of pressure treated out there there's also different methods of treating it but the guys at yellow wood are using a specific type of copper that's infused into the wood called MCA micronized copper Azul and there's a couple different grades or amounts of that you can get but if you look at the end tag it's gonna tell the story right here on this end tag it says end use ground contact and then it's going to tell how much of that copper is in there on this in tag right here it says 0.15 PCF that's 0.15 pounds of copper per square foot now if this wood was only rated for above ground it would say point zero six pounds per foot so this one basically has more than double the copper injected into the wood compared to one that was only rated for above ground now I think this is a great choice for decks because that hopper is what's keeping us from rot and decay it's what's keeping that wood preserved over time so a higher amount of that is a good thing and in particular the type of preservative they use that micronized copper is less corrosive to fasteners so you don't necessarily have to go with stainless steel you can actually use hot dipped galvanized now if you're on the coast or a saltwater environment of course you want to go stainless but in general you can use hot dipped when you're using this type of preservative this is a great choice for deck framing tips two through five are all about either keeping the deck dry or making sure that once it gets wet it can dry out so tip number two we want to space our ledger board off of whatever we're building this deck up against in our case here we're building this up against the pool deck so I actually have a concrete that I'm attaching my ledger to so this makes it a little bit easier I'm not worried about rotting out what's behind there but I want to space that ledger board off there's a bunch of different ways you can do this but what we're doing here is I've taken some stainless steel fender washers I've tripled those up and then where we epoxy some dowels in to attach our ledger I've put those three stainless steel fender washers on first and then we're attaching the ledger on there and bolting that on it's going to give us a little bit of a gap not a massive gap you know something like an eighth of an inch but what that's going to mean is when that two by twelve ledger gets wet it's going to be able to dry inside or out and we're not going to trap moisture up against that concrete wall now this would be even more important if we were up against a house ledger you know oftentimes when you build a deck on a house you're up against that two by twelve ledger board sitting on top of the foundation and if we sandwich those right on there that's a place that water can sit and that water can rot out the house we do not want that there's a couple ways you can do this again you could use fender washers but you actually want more of an air gap if it's a house there's a deck spacer product you can buy online I'll put a link in the description on that it looks like a hockey puck with a hole in it it's going to get a bigger gap for you or you could even do the cheap method which is basically cutting down some PVC pipe into one-inch sections and then using that as a sleeve everywhere you're drilling into the house that's a really inexpensive way to go and it's gonna get you that air gap okay tip number three posts now there's two options for posts I like to opt for steel posts whenever I can that's gonna be some type of Steel 4x4 column that's gonna come down if I use steel I may have some rust that I need to deal with but there's certainly never any rot issues and I can put that steel post right on top of the concrete pier in this case however most deck jobs out there don't have that luxury they're gonna end up using let's say a four by four or a six by six post the biggest thing the biggest mistake I see all the time out there is people that pour up here and then put their posts right on top of that concrete pier or even worse like a fence builder they put that post down into a hole and then pour concrete around it no matter what type of pressure training you've got you were gonna kill your decks life by doing this what we want to do is have a concrete pier that's above grade and then we're gonna use a metal post base on there so that we can set that wood off the ground and that way when that post does get wet it's going to be able to dry there's a nice air gap between that post and the concrete below it now one of the tip that's going to give you ultimate longevity is you want to use an end sealer on that now there's a bunch of different products you can use I happen to get this one locally but you can either dip it or you can brush it and that's going to seal up that end grain on that post to really give you that extra long life okay next up joists tape now this is slightly optional I would say depending on how much rain you're getting but if you think about the fasteners for those deck boards that come down and come into our two by eights here that we're using for structure that's a weak point on that pressure treating and even though we've got a higher content I'm worried that over time water is gonna sit in there in between those deck boards and rot that out if you're in a rainy climate you absolutely use need to use a joist tape and our climate it's a little bit optional but we're gonna opt for it here because it's really a best practice now you really you could use just about any any peel-and-stick for this the guys at vet at Vicor make a specific one called deck protector but really just about anybody's peel-and-stick is gonna work roughly a four inch wide peel-and-stick you're gonna put that on top of all your joists all your ledger boards and now when we screw down in there we're gonna have some amount of self sealing and we're gonna reduce the amount of water the those two biomaterials are gonna soak up okay in the fifth and final tip for you joy spacing you know most X you see out there are framed on 16 inch centers and that generally works you don't want to go any more than 16 but in this case we've actually opted to go for 12 inch on centers as I said we've got a premium wood product here if we run it on 12 inch centers man that's gonna make a really durable deck we're gonna have really good support for our deck material no matter what our choices are and we're gonna make sure that even in 20 or 30 years if someone decides to change out the deck boards for appearance reasons we're gonna have a durable deck that's gonna last no problem that we could read X sometime in the future guys thanks for watching if you follow these five deck tips I think you're gonna get a deck that's gonna go 30 40 50 plus years no problem in fact you might change your decking boards on a deck built like this but you're not gonna have to change your framing now a couple of specialized things we talked about there'll be links to those and ant on Amazon below also I'm gonna put a link to our friends at timber town they've got offices in Texas and in Georgia so you can buy from them if you're in those locations and big thanks to yellow wood for sponsoring as well link to those guys that's of course available in nationwide follow us on Twitter Instagram otherwise we'll see you next time on the build show [Music]

Channel: Matt Risinger

Views: 704,138

Rating: 4.8752832 out of 5

Keywords: Decks, Deck Framing, Decking, Deck Tips, YellaWood, Yellow Wood, Pressure Treated, PT Wood, Deck Frame tips, Deck Rot

Id: vK60ESSpmrI

Length: 8min 8sec (488 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 28 2018