How to Install deck Boards In A Shady Area!

today I'm going to teach you how to install your deck boards it doesn't matter what kind of wood you're using they all have the same problem none of its straight so I got a bunch of tips and tricks to share with you to help make your life easy so today is deck day last night we put all of our lumber on our deck just to store it leaving it on the ground is not a good idea because it's really really long and so if you put it on your neck which should be level it'll help keep your board straight and they won't twist overnight so we're gonna restock the pile now real quick so we can start laying it and the idea here is we want to start with the finish of the deck don't start at the house folks I always start where your deck finishes this will enable you to get a perfect measurement for your overhang you can take into account what kind of skirting system you're going to use and there are a few that would work for you so we'll go through those options and then you want to pull out your jigsaw and cut around your posts get everything nice and snug and pretty and then we'll get going really important to have a straight line when you start really really important to make sure when you order your decking boards grab a few extra they're always going to be disappointed when they deliver there's always gonna be a couple in there you just want to throw in the garbage and we'll show you a tip and a trick and what to do with the wood after you're done it involves the handrail in shorter pieces so even the big crazy work pieces will be useful later on so we got a search of wood but for now let's get moving it will move a couple boards at a time and that'll help us to sort out the really bad ones right away my system for installing your five quarter deck boards is as follows one take your load and start laying it out and you'll quickly identify boards that have got a bad warp to them I call it the hockey stick collection and they're all over here okay now when you take a look at what I'm doing here you can see real quickly that I've got probably three or four boards there that I can use there's only half length that's really simple I've got handrail sections here that I can use out of that lumber as well so I don't want to be installing that on the deck especially in the early part because I don't like to fight with those boards if it's not necessary if I have to force a couple them in which we will just provide the number here I can tell I've got probably two or three that I'm gonna have to force in then that's fine but I'm identify the straightest number that I have just by putting them down together and when you lay it all out most of these boards that are here now are in pretty good shape as far as it being straight that's where we got to start now once we get straight we also want to take a look at the crown crowning on a deck board can be really awkward especially when they're 16 feet long Oh rule number one when you're working with this stuff every time you see a sticker get rid of it nothing worse than being done seeing stickers sticking out of your deck anyway you're gonna see that all the wood has got a grain in it okay so what you want is you take a look at the grain it's like a bowl in a lot of cases and that bowl is gonna start like this and it'll curl over time so what you want to do is you wanna have the crown up which is the top of the rainbow facing up so that it's like this instead okay while that's drying it'll be trying to dry ends down which are already screwed in place so then the board stays flat if you leave it the other way it'll be fighting and drying and trying to lift your screws you run the risk of these things kind of coming loose over time and you get this cupping effect it's not very nice to walk on so crown up now we take a look at this wood it's in pretty decent shape just gonna do a visual inspection I'm looking for chunks that are missing rough surfaces knots that have come loose and fallen out but I think that board is in good shape so here we are I'm happy with that one it's nice and tight nice and straight this little bit of rubbing is just dirt and that will come off at the very end when we give it a quick light sand and now I'm also looking for the my second best board and that's going to go on the nosing so it also has to be perfectly straight we also want to see what kind of condition this board is in and we're good and if your board is longer than your deck and you're going to be doing cut-offs this one has a split in it yes it does so there's a split in this board right here so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this board I'm going to spin it around so I'm installing the split on the cutoff side not on my install side and that'll help to make sure that I don't have a big gap showing up next year that's gonna get wet and stay wet and promote early rot so we want to eliminate that problem from happening before we start and the crown is in the right way get rid of my sticker now let's get this flipped around now this is the advantage of getting boards longer than you're gonna use now there's a lot of people out there have this misconception the cedar only comes in 16 foot lengths it's not true I can get it up to 20 feet we have a couple of locations in town that have great relationships with Mills and get me 20-foot cedar boards so I can do an 18 19 foot deck and still just install all my splits and cut them off when I'm done and that's worth its weight in gold because the end of the day the last thing you want to do is build your deck with joints on the joists that's why we're replacing this deck the one that was here was cedar and it they did that they had short lumber and that caused early rot it was a disaster so we're gonna avoid that at all costs because when we're installing that's got a bad split and it's already cupping so it's upside down and it's backwards now the reason I like to take my extra time here is the process for actually installing it is just screwing it down so once I get going with my screws I don't like to stop and inspect and flip and turn that's the wrong time to do that because there's usually other people helping you put all the screws in someone's gonna take the board in the back of the head just take time lay it out get it pretty much ready to go here's an example of a decision that you got to make for yourself I'm bleeding imagine that this board right in this position is crowned is crown up the way we want it that's the most ideal situation unfortunately it also comes with some bad damage on the edge here in two spots probably from some young kid at the store where the forklift doesn't know what the hell he's doing not a big deal okay yeah it's crowned the wrong way but I would rather have it crown the wrong way than have a nasty ugly spot showing and because we ordered this on a delivery I don't have a whole lot of choice I got to use this board because it's so straight I think it's worth it to put it the wrong way reminding myself this I'll pull the board off the wall like that now I know that this is crowned the wrong way all right and when I'm installing this I'm gonna use a little construction adhesive on the joist just to help make sure I don't get the Buckley all right so before we go Dec we want to make sure we have our vision for our skirt in place and that's the area we're closing off underneath the deck we gotta make sure we don't get animals crawling underneath we don't want any skunks making a home under here because that would really wreck the atmosphere so let's talk about options so that you have the ability to make your decision how you want to do yours first of all with your first board in place you should measure off to the wall and find out what kind of a sliver you're gonna have left at the house we're gonna be about a half board which is perfect so I'm not going to worry about the math because either way I move this to make my skirt I'm gonna be fine if you end up with just a little little tiny piece you might consider making some of your gaps just a little bit bigger so that you finish with a full board but that's another story here we go my first board up against all my posts I have a three and a half piece of 4x4 plus the one and a half that's five inches these are five quarter by six they actually end up being about five and an eighth five and a quarter boom there we go look at how flush that is that isn't terrible that leaves a nice gap on the backside so if I finish flat like that no that's easy right but how do you finish the deck if I put any material here it's gonna be in front of the board so if you use a deck board as a frame around your whole deck like this you'll still have enough material down here you could attach a lattice or you could attach skirt board because skirt board is like a fence board and it's only 5/8 when this is inch and a quarter so it'll have a nice recess it'll look very clean and you can put vertical skirt board underneath the other option you got of course is to create a nosing at the beginning of the deck now since this is going to be a staircase I know it takes a little bit more work but if you were to do the math and set yourself up with a nice stair nosing and then a skirt board then you've got something to attach your steps to everything looks clean and tidy and then the end result is this nosing is the same as the stair so then in order to get that set up we want to measure this off about an inch and a quarter so that after our five-eighths we still have a 5/8 overhang I like 5/8 overhang because two of these boards on a traditional riser that you can buy from the store as a premade is the same depth as the stair plus 5/8 okay so if you start with a 5/8 after your skirt is on you'll end up with the same nosing size on every stair and that's a nice way to finish it doesn't take a whole lot of math so 5/8 plus 5/8 inch and a quarter so we're just gonna take our tape and we're gonna measure back inch in the quarter right there okay and then I'm going to measure from here to my deck board that's up against all my posts all right and I have a one inch gap all right now I don't want to take off one inch of material because I still need a gap width when I'm done so I want to take off 7/8 I want to leave 1/8 for the expansion contraction so while my joints are consistent so what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna say there we go I've got my system in place I have to notch out 7/8 around every one of these posts and that's just a really simple way to do this so what I'm gonna do is i'm going to take my giant triangle here up against my deck now watch this because these corners are all rounded all right and the system here with a rounded deck is really quite dangerous if you flip it around this way you'll make contact with the solid side and you'll actually make the mark on the right place okay so there we go I always come backwards and slide up to your post and when you're cutting cut the pencil to disappear and you know you're making the right move don't worry about making the pencil mark too long it's not gonna matter when we're all done we're gonna come back with the sander anyway now the trick here is we want to make this look like it was built from scratch perfectly which it isn't we're salvaging the old frame so every one of these deck you know post locations is just a little bit different so the second one in the fourth winner in contact with the wood this one and the first one aren't so there's a little bit of movement so if we cut all of them exactly the same we're gonna end up with gaps so here instead of 7/8 I'm going to remove an extra 8 boom then I go to 3/4 and this 1 and 7/8 where I'm making contact it's probably the most important measurement on the entire build once you get this one done everything else should just go nice and smooth because we've organized our wood to be straight and we have a finish all figured out so this one board the first one you set on behind your post once you've got that that's like your template all you got to do is make sure everything is gapped consistently after that you're home free so we're just gonna take our jigsaw here now and we're gonna line up our blade so that we're actually eating the pencil now I want my blade just to the side of the pencil on the outside so my I'm actually cutting the hole just a hair bigger than it needs to be because I know what's going to happen is this cedar is going to shrink and all of these gaps if I make them really tight now we'll have a nice gap later so I don't want to leave too much room [Music] now here's the trick for you when you're cutting back on a curve like this with the jigsaw you want to just hold yourself in an angle this way so it's grabbing the wood at the bottom or the blade will tend to bend okay and you'll end up with the top will be right on the line but the bottom will be sticking out and it won't fit in the hole so just a quick visual inspection here I saw just a spot here where I didn't get deep enough so I'm gonna just take my exacto knife I'm gonna clean up my edge just a note jigsaws don't have a break on them make sure the blade stops moving before you sat down and always set it down sideways that's a lesson you learn the hard way so what I'm doing now is I'm setting this board in place it's not moving around and using this screw just to mark the middle of my stud or my choice sorry so then after I get all my deck boards in place it's a lot easier for me to know exactly where I'm going I don't have it all buried on me there you go you want the head just a little bit below the surface don't leave it out it'll look like junk what happens is that wood will end up swelling up over time and slowly close that hole over it'll be perfect so if you've watched our previous deck videos you've seen that I'm in love with the camo system and it's a kind of system that has its own handle and it feeds screws on an angle just below the rounded part on the edge on a 45 degree angle and it pins it down that way it keeps all the surface free and clear from screws and I love that but here because we were saving the old frame we weren't sure the condition of the wood and the truth is the top of the wood and a lot of places has experienced a little bit of rot and as a result I don't want to have to trust the camo screw to hold into soft lumber and keep my boards from warping so we're going with surface screws on this one just because it's not brand new wood that's really the whole thinking behind this so I ever going with 3-inch when we order the material we were taking to account that the wood on the surface might not be up to snuff and going with 3-inch just solves all that concern now it's also the cedar screw the brown one here's a note for you there's two kind of colors of screws in the market where we are there's green and brown and generally speaking pressure-treated lumber came and green up until recently now they have a brown pressure number they still have a green pressure-treated lumber and here's what I'm gonna suggest I don't care what color your wood is you buy the brown screw all right if you buy green lumber use the brown screw it's going to look stupid for the first year but for the next 39 years of the deck life it'll be the same color as that pressure-treated lumber once the Sun has a chance to get at it for a little while if you use the green screw it'll look great for the first year and look stupid for the next 39 years the people are sticklers about putting the screw in exactly the same spot one inch off the edge has to be one inch off the edge if there's a knot in the wood one inch off the edge don't put a screw there okay find somewhere else to put that screw you have to get outside the rings of that knot all right if that knot was right here I'd be putting my first screw over here because I'm not screwing through a knot it's guaranteed to crumble and pop on you and if you have to let's say you have a knot right where you want to put your screw what you do is you mimic the camo screw system a drilling backwards underneath the curve until you set your angle that you want and then you can drive this screw and you can throw a screw in that way and that's a great way to get a screw to hold down the edge even if you have a knot now here we go you see that pull nice and tight now we're going to be using the saw later to cut off the edge so it's better if you all of your edges are screwed down first because that'll save you a whole lot of time and you won't have to screw around with it afterwards and risk splitting your wood so when I start to put in that screw I could feel the resistance of the knot and it was much further than what it was visible there so the knots probably gone an angle through the wood so what I did is I went into reverse and I burned it backwards pushing down through the wood once I cleared the knot then I drove it in this board isn't perfectly straight we know that because we took time to map it all out and what I've grabbed here is a board that's not straight to demonstrate how to install it now here's the secret when you have a board that's tight on both ends and the big gap is in the middle the the thing that I've seen a lot of guys do is they'll grab the board like this and the poet oh that's perfect put a screw in but what's not perfect is the ends are still touching wood to wood and it's really difficult to screw that last board exactly where you want it because even when you do that as soon as I start pulling here it doesn't close consistently and you don't want to just flip the board over because that's not the crown so we flip the board over the Crown's upside-down and we don't want to do that if we don't have to so take the time stand the bad boy up and flip it over that way try not to destroy those now now that the board's flipped around I start pulling this tight you can see I can have a nice and tight here and then it opens up wide on your end it's a lot easier manipulate the end as you go along so because our gap is now perfect here and put my square that's gonna be the gap that I'm using I'm gonna use my tool to establish my gap on the whole project okay and of course I'm near the end so I'm gonna burn the screw in so since we're going to be putting a lot of pressure on the boards we're going to start screwing at the very ends so what you want to do you start your screw in the wood put it on reverse and push down while going backwards till you get a little smoke and you drive it down and it'll never split on you don't ask me to explain the science behind it I don't know I just know it works I learned that trick of all things from an electrician carpenter taught him that was nice when guys share their tips and tricks there's the smoke if you've ever tried putting screws in the end of a piece of cedar you know what splits 99 times out of 99 the fact that I just did four in a row means that I can make miracles happen this is the point where we can put some pressure on this wood and pull it forward okay the secret is if you close the gap too fast too aggressively at the beginning you're gonna have all your wood contact with each other but you should be able to close it just a little bit every board until you get to the end that's one way to straighten the board there is another way I'll show you that now let's get all of your street ones out of the way just for the purpose of the demonstration we'll grab another hockey stick oh that's a beauty there's a nice gap down there but halfway it's gone okay so let me throw a few screws in this and straighten it out and I'll come down and show you my other secret the crazy part here is the woods coming along and it comes back in and then it curves it really a lot of fun so what I gotta do is I gotta get this wide enough now to get this in here okay what's that over where I want it whew deal with it every joist so let's say for instance you're not in the greatest issue and you don't want to have to really hurt yourself and you're not alone let's say you're building a deck and your lovely wife is joining you and you need some help closing the boards here is a great trick our gap is only half an inch it's not that dramatic right but you want to put that square in there because I have two points of contact between my wood alright and this is why this works so well and we're gonna put this here perpendicular but we're gonna throw a little bit of degree on it a little bit of an angle okay so now my my force on the board is on the bottom part of the wood when I'm driving it over and it's as simple as putting that screw into the frame there we go and using it as a fulcrum I set my screw here set my screw here that's set my screw here now ladies this is something that's awesome you can do this all by yourself because you can sit on top of your dick get it off set up it's a one-person operation and you can just lean with your hand you can throw your shoulder into it okay and you close that gap until you're absolutely in love with it drive your screw don't release the pressure until you get all your through them all right and then let off and hopefully the surface of your deck won't be that damaged and this is gonna be a little snug but it'll come in you're gonna find that when you do this this screw is gonna get buried in the wood and when you go to back it out it'll most likely come up like this you don't want to leave this laying around set that screw right there on the wood and just push forward and it'll just pop right off that way no one ever steps on a screw and you can use the board over again and over and over and over again so just remember the secret here is the only curve you want to fix is when it's opening away at the end if you flip it over and it creates a rainbow in front of you you got the board on backwards flip the board around because that's the easy way to manipulate the wood trying to close the middle is always a real real frustration and you're never gonna get the ends with the gap properly this way you're guaranteed to have a consistent gap and you only need to have one little three-foot piece of wood extra laying around to help you do it so do-it-yourself trick but it's a lot more fast if you it's a lot more fast it's a it's a do-it-yourselfer trick but it's a lot of fun if you have someone helping you out with that it makes a deck job go real quick even if your woods lousy so one last quick tip before I let you go and we jump into this deck here when you're screwing your wood down with a lousy piece of what that is set your tip where you want it all right and then put your hand on the back your drill have some nice downward pressure and I'll tell you why right there that's perfect you got lots of control if you're going single handed and your drill ever slips off that screw because you're pushing down so hard with one hand it'll skip off and put a big hole in your wood like that you don't want that in your pretty deck so instead of pushing really hard with one hand you can just go and keep that keep the contact between the the drill bit and the screw with your left hand and then you don't have to push so hard and even if you slip off you can catch yourself alright that's a great tip for beginners just to make sure that you're not going to punch a bunch of holes in your wood you'd be surprised how many times just slip out of that screw there coated so sometimes the filler the head gets filled up with the coating and it's not quite as teddy to think until you start putting a lot of pressure on it and then disaster strikes [Music] we are down to our last two deck boards to go in here and of course the last one is scribed in it's all specialty detail cuts and we have an angle we want to get underneath the window trim over there so you'll find that when you get your piece cut and you think you're ready to go just no way to get that wedged in there so that's why a second of last board you don't screw in now you can use this technique when you're doing flooring of all kinds as well cut the board lay it in so you could have something to measure from but then go back and install the other piece first and then you can go back and install this one because this is a lot a slide-in boom nice the matter screwing them down and we're done now I got one more trick for you max you remember we separated all of our boards are good and bad so these are the bad and the ugly and we're gonna start throwing a screw over here I'm going to show you a technique now you don't want to rely on this but it is effective and that is you take you screw on a significant angle get it started okay take your pry bar and before you screw it down lift it up and then just measure what you're doing here get about 1/4 that screw through the hole in the bottom until it's in contact with the way now that screws on an angle contacting that wood with a space and we all know that when we tighten this up it's gonna pull the wood closed ready screwing magic ok so just to recap because we said our posts inside our frame our frame is inch and a half so included this plus I want a one inch overhang which is the actual thickness of 5 quarter board it's amazing how nothing is the same dimension as what it says on the package now we're gonna just go like this and I've lined it up over there as well nothing is really as straight as it should be around here but I think at the end of the day when we're all done it's gonna have a really nice look and no one's going to know if there's a little coming and going with the skirt overhang all right so I'm just using a fine-tooth saw this is actually a cheat this is my PVC saw for plumbing but comes in so handy with software lumber this is a noise alright so that's pretty much covers everything you need to know for tips and tricks for laying down deck boards remember spacing is important but more important is being patient and being happy with every piece you install because it's really hard to go back and fix it later if you get irritated after the fact okay so now it's time to go on to handrails and stairs [Music]

Channel: Home RenoVision DIY

Views: 554,609

Rating: 4.8609667 out of 5

Keywords: home renovision, renovation, bathroom renovation, reality renovision, jeff thorman, construction, diy renovations, renovations, do it yourself, diy, instructional, hrv, how to build a deck, deck boards, install deck boards, deckboards, how to finish a deck, weekend deck, cedar deck

Id: YNCtYXVWAII

Length: 30min 11sec (1811 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 16 2018