How to Build a Deck From Start to Finish

good day thanks for tuning in I'm Cody with up to code today we're at my folks place and we're gonna build them a deck and we're gonna go through deck ledger preparation drip caps making sure you have water shed and more of the structural component giving you some tips and ideas on how to build a square level how to set your beam we're gonna run through drop beams flush beams and just go through a bunch of tips there's going to be jam-packed full of information and whatever information we don't have in this will link to other videos along the way stairs as an example I don't know how much of actual deck planking we'll get to do but that's I think once the structures there the decking is pretty easy well lots of information here so stay tuned [Music] [Music] okay so this situation that we have here is a little bit different but it's the proper way to do it we do have another video on how we actually get the preparation here this is an eephus stucco system the drip caps are relatively the same in conventional methods and I'll draw you some photos and details there but probably the biggest thing is making sure you have a lower drip cap here if if you're starting from fresh or if you have the ability that way you're just trying to prevent water from trickling here and then just running underneath and then hot it basically will just soak into the house so what will happen here is it'll still trickle in but I want it this is angled at a 60 degree angle downward and then it'll run back out and it'll drip and break and fall away that's the whole point of a drip cap what I like what we did here this is actually two ply ledger because we have three inch of foam on the house and the first ply that's up against the house I actually made kerf cuts so I took my skill saw 1/8 deep maybe 3/16 and I just made a bunch of vertical cuts in that and that's something that we're gonna start doing on all our decks because what happens is if you get complacent in the wintertime the snow builds up and when it thaws and freezes thaws freezes what happens as the water will just sit here and it'll just saturate whatever's there but if you have your proper building paper which I'll show you here in a minute you have it in behind there and if you do those vertical curved cuts it allows the water to run down and if you watershed everything properly it'll run out of this drip cap you see so it's a perfect system and then we have this top one we've designed this so our deck boards will fit in between and then same thing any water up here if it runs in it just drips off and either onto your deck and outward but at the end of the day you just want to protect your house deck ladders I think are probably one of the biggest things that are failed on a house because everyone's like oh they just it's a detail that everyone forgets they just slap on the ledger and they don't think about how to protect it when water there and basically capillary action and saturation in behind keep that in mind but I'll show you some diagram alright so this is I do this diagram a lot for my guys on site let's say this is your wall here's your plywood whatever here's a stud and a stud and maybe your basement your basement concrete so I'll do a few different colors for you you want to put your deck ladder on if you're starting from fresh wood I tell my guys is I just run a piece of tie back or tar paper depending if you're doing stucco or what what you're doing I just put a piece of paper there then then I put this bottom drip cap on like that then this is what I like to do on conventional methods is I like to do a piece of peel and stick and I'll have to extend some of my lines here sorry so your paper runs up the blue ones the peel and stick then you put your deck ledger on there's the deck ledger and then you calculate this out man that's why it's good to think ahead my friends oh yeah then you put your other drip cap on obviously there's no gaps and really because we're purl right all of us or you're gonna be pro after watching my videos so then with that you have protection in behind the blue ones you're peeling stick the red one is your building paper then later if you're doing parking or something you can tuck other paper underneath this and shingle effect it this is all shingle effect and then later when you do the rest of building your your building paper can run on top of here and everything's laps so water gets in here runs out water tries to do the capillary and here we've curved cut the back of our rim joist and it has peel-and-stick for extra protection and it runs down and out of that drip cap so that's how you prepare for that I think that's got enough in full there let's get into building the deck right so we're gonna run through what a drop beam is versus what a flush beam is just more of an architectural difference so let's say that's your ledger on the wall I'll try to draw it a bit bigger over emphasize it then you have your joists there's your joist now what a drop beam does is it sits below so it's dropped so whether you have two plies or three plies depending on the engineering then you have your post and whether it's it's on blocks or a piling or whatever right so that's a drop beam so what you're allowed to get away with is you can actually do like a 24 inch cantilever sorry bad rating you do a two-foot cantilever here so you can keep that in mind so you can go a little bit bigger deck and a bigger span on a smaller joists because you're loading your actual span is from end of bearing to end a bearing so this is your span and because this is a cantilever when this weight is on here it actually helps push the middle back up so rather than it just sagging down the middle cantilever actually helps kind of counterbalance it a little bit so that's one way that's kind of the most common way today we're gonna do a flush beam just my brother Rudy figured he liked the look of it better there's only really one drawback in this situation I guess if you want the bigger spans that's a drawback to the world we're going to light ends anyway so there's our ledger so a flush beam is just you actually build your team at the end you have your post and then obviously you need more joist hangers you need a joist hanger here and a joist hanger here and then it's all just nice and perpendicular or parallel it's it's just flush it's a nice clean look the only drawback today is we're actually gonna set this on concrete blocks which is a full pas in my mind but we'll go through that in a little bit so this concrete block might actually end sticking out past the front of the deck but decisions been made already we're just we're just gonna do it first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna pre build our beam so what we're gonna do basically we got to get the length of this whole tire ledger and we'll build our beam the exact same length but in the previous clip I did lie to you we're actually doing 2 by 8 joists I don't know how my brother talked me into it but so I have a 2 by 10 ledger here it's gonna be a little goofy but we're doing a 2 by 10 perimeter so I'll show you how that's gonna look so that just adds a little bit of complexity because if I was keeping it all the same I would just measure the total length of my ledger make my beam the exact same and then we'll show you then from there you can start squaring and leveling and getting your Heights so today what we're gonna do is I'm just gonna measure an inch and a half I'm going to do that on each end so this is a two by ten now if you put your ledger on level then you should be able to just use squares for everything so now I'm going to do the same thing on the other end and my beam is actually going to be three inches shorter I'm going to measure from here to the inside of the other two by ten we're gonna build everything to this line and then later we'll just gonna cap the outside with two by ten now if you notice I like using pwf treated underneath my choice my rim because this is like below grade or underground rated treated and you can see the perforations it's not the super nice outdoor wood and and now that's probably why I talked me into this is because we can do pwf for everything the structure work and then the two by tens and we cap the outside will be the outdoor wood so it'll look nice so that's that'll actually work pretty nice okay so I'm gonna get brother Ruud here he's sitting on his behind come on well he's the bee's knees rudia stuff when we first started up to code me and Ruud we're building all the decks together so this brings back some good memories a riddle now if you're doing this by yourself you can just set a nail here and pull the tape and we could probably but I'll get rudl rudl noodle to hold the tape for me no I'll just do I'll show them how to do with this since my math ain't too good I'll just pull out 20 feet okay so that's 20 feet so we're 28 28 foot this'll drive you guys in the u.s. mad we're not the US and UK all you metric folk are gonna hate us 28 foot 8 and I'm just gonna say 3/4 it's a hair less 28 8 and 3/4 that's length of my being here's what the beans gonna look like when you're looking directly up the house so I'm just gonna keep it really simple I'm gonna split it in half 14 foot four and three eights like that metric dudes love it okay we're gonna do five posts and like I said we're just gonna split this post on the on the seam there then if when we do the two by ten later you can overlap this joint if you want to get fancy which we might as well so we're gonna get started on that but another thing before we get too far ahead what I want to show you another thing I would like to keep in mind is I want to try to calculate my deck length so my deck boards will work and I'll show you how to do that but what I got to keep in mind is because I need my joist length I need to know what that is but I also have to keep in mind that I'm adding a 2 by 10 to the outside for the nice little cap and then I got a should when I do the last deck board because the stairs are usually like a 1 inch nosing if I do that around the whole perimeter then I have a nosing so that I can always just put stairs up and I always have that right you always need a nosing or it should be recommended so me and Rudy are gonna get going on the beam but the next thing after that is getting this calculated so that you don't end up with just a little one-inch chunk at the end and it's so frustrating because it's like oh I just got this little chunk of deck board that's teeter-tottering and it's up under my drip cap and I can't screw it so we want under this drip cap we were gonna try to aim for a full size piece so mathematics is fun I also forgot to mention if you're doing a beam such as this you are allowed to cantilever the beam from your post up to 18 inches so just keep that in mind but you can't go more than 18 and your joists on a drop beam scenario can cantilever pass the beam 24 but the reason this is only 18 is because a beam takes more load so you can't have as much cantilever there but anyway we're gonna get going on this then I need to figure out my spacing for my posts and like I said we need to figure out our joist lengths but till then we're gonna build for a little bit we also want to crown all our material so what crowd means if you stay there you have two parallel edges to a board the boards either gonna go like this or it's gonna go like that and crown up so you want it to always hump up so it kind of fights up against gravity or however you want to say it so this one if you look carefully I always just look down the edges crown up is on this side so we always want to mark up you always want to mark them because when you're cutting and flipping and turning Oh see it Rudy already marked it so you use a good low pup he remembers now I wonder if he remembers this we used to go crazy when we first started we miter saw everything and now we just skill saw it if you're any decent you could do it with a skill e your deck boards you might want to do with the miter saw but the structural work isn't doesn't need to be as fancy and then if you're on a budget or if you don't own a miter saw you can do it all with fairly inexpensive hand tools or you know you don't need the full array of artillery one thing I always like to make sure is the factory ends are square and they're not too chipped the other end I've already analyzed and looked at quick the other end I want to cut off this ends pretty decent it's not perfect but so I'm just going to go 14 foot four and three eights and if you noticed I made that that little tick that's where you're the waste side is so when I make this mark I'm gonna cut the pencil line off and my skill saw blade sits on this side and if you notice here this ends kind of garbled that end gets gone Roode's going to cut that [Applause] we're gonna make sure we crown these right way because of all our little trips around our funky set up here we would have got confused so luckily we marked them so we'll crown the same way we're gonna flush them up and we're gonna nail these together but what you also got to keep in mind is our saw horses are spread way too far apart you don't want your beam if your saw horses are spread right out the beans gonna sag and then when you nail that together it's gonna you're gonna nail a SAG into it so you just got to be mindful of that so we're just angling these because these are three into quarters and we don't want them gouge and poking out the other side and if you change directions you'll never pull this beam apart so don't screw up just go up a little bit rude yep I'll just set it for straight now and then I'll fill in between after and these are galvanized nails I don't know if you heard us say that oh oh boy you got a crank on her now boy oh yeah Kate pull doc now that's called the toenail if you need to push your beam and get it more flush toenail it and then you can pal Matt but we don't need to pound it because it's flush the manipulator scared ya if I needed to get these more flush I could beat that with my hammer and they would drive this top one over but it's flush I'll apologize right now if I repeat myself the beams are done there are two plies but remember we're doing that third ply with the two by ten later so I think I mentioned that now what I said earlier is this is kind of a full paw I don't normally like using these blocks but sometimes you can't go over kill all the time sometimes you want to build something and you want it remotely budget-friendly you have to use something like this now on a deck the reason we usually like to do a concrete piling or even a screw pile is so the deck doesn't float or sink you know cuz in the winter you have frost I can heave it up or you can get to sink or settle into the ground but in this scenario we have all the tools we have to know how we want to just do this simply we're gonna set it on these blocks and worst-case scenario we just either just add in some chunks or we just change the posts and adjust the heights if it's sinks or settles problem with these I've never done them I've usually just on pilings but that's overkill if you're doing a covered deck you definitely want pilings right because you need to roof load and it has to actually hold and be structural now I will say this now if you're doing a flush beam like you are today and you do it on concrete pilings and they're structural then later if you want you can add a covered deck easily because you can lam the post on the corner of your deck right if you do a dropped beam and the beam is back and your joists are cantilevered you can't do a covered deck as easily because then your your point loading in the wrong spot so maybe we'll show you that if I think of it when we wouldn't come it's time to it so now if we kind of got a massage to in order to get our joists level we need to I'll show you as we get there but since these things we have to dig down and we don't know the length yet we got to kind of figure out a nice way to do it where we get these placed we get the beam somewhat set even if it's just roughly then we get it exactly square where we want it and then we're just gonna have to fine tune and muck around so that's why you're making the video with us so you can see as we go along how we figured this all out so now we need to figure out the length of our joists so what I'm going to do is so these are all our deck boards now they're not as tight as I'd like them I'm definitely not going to count this row because there's a big gap there but what I'm going to do is in one two three four five six seven rows of deck board it's thirty nine and a quarter one two three four five six seven seven is thirty nine and a quarter because if you figure them out individually if you're like a sixteenth off you could actually mess up over twenty or thirty boards so that's five and nine sixteenths that's five and five eighths that's five and a half so we're just gonna take an average thirty nine and a quarter four seven so let's go get our little white board we're gonna use a more friendly color right now we're gonna let's just go through that again we have a double ledger we have our joist we have a two ply beam and we have our third ply which is going to be a two by ten then we want so we have a drip cap here we want our deck boards to sit like so we want a one inch overhang for stairs for future for a nosing we're gonna go 20 six boards at 5.6 zero inches each equals so it's a hundred and forty five point six inches so that's from the house to here so I need to minus one inch is one forty four point six but I'm just gonna round this up to a hundred and forty five inches because that way if my last deck board goes here and I have a little gap you won't notice because I have a three inches of foam in a three inch drip cap here so 145 is my total length so I got to take a hundred and forty five minus three inches for here minus four and a half for here inch and a half inch and half inch and a half so that gives me my joists length now because I'm not that bright it's one thirty seven and a half okay Rudy one thirty seven and a half so we're gonna cut four or five of those and that reminds me of another trick let me show you so here's something to keep in mind if your deck ledger is nice and straight I'm gonna eyeball this make sure it's super straight and if that's the case and we're doing a deck setup like we are we can cut all our joists the exact same but if you're up against an old crone or house and the deck Ledger's like this I would recommend you'd almost have to do minimal amount of joists and then string line your beam so it's nice and straight and then you'd literally have to individually cut every single joist or if you're doing a drop to be you just land all your joists let them overhang the beam you chalk a line on top of your joists and then you square down and you just cut all the tails off accordingly that's if your Ledger's crooked I think ours is pretty straight and if it is we're just gonna cut all our joists the exact same it looks pretty good to me so we're gonna cut them all at one hundred thirty seven and a half we're just going to cut five four now we want to kind of just get this rigged up so we can get it level and we got to get our post locations down and that's the little massage work that we got to do to get it right so I've been scratching my head how to get this all figured because these silly posts are bugging me up but what there's and I want to show you more ways than one of how to figure out your deck first off what we're gonna do is we're gonna pull a string line down the whole building now I can't do that by myself because it's brand-new stucco I don't want to wreck it at all so I'm gonna get Rudy to help me there and we're gonna pull a string line all the way down and then over there we're gonna mark the string and then I just need to remeasure back from my string Line point like four and seven eighths and that's where I want the start of the beam once I know where the start of the beam is then I can figure out where this first block is gonna go also actually rude I'm gonna measure one forty two we're because we're one forty-five overall but I'm one forty two to the ledger and I'm just gonna go rough so this be roughly the outside of the deck okay yeah so I'm just gonna clean this but bit of gravel and then we'll pull the string line and we'll get this right down to the nitty-gritty so what we're doing right now we're just gonna make the deck parallel and in line with the end of the house so what I got to figure out is just as the string touches the building and then I want to get my level so that it's sit and plumb so this nail will represent the end of the house and then we're four and seven eighths back to where the beam starts let's say five oh you wanted this flushed in your route yeah you said you wanted it flush rude can you move this block around for me yeah you got to lift it to four and seven eighths it's got to go note to this edge hold on just come in like an inch or I want to kind of get a lift it end oh yeah that's probably get there yeah so that's four and seven eighths and then we're gonna measure from the building out one forty and a half to the outside yeah so good thing I made that drawing one forty and a half to the outside of my beam roots just hold me right at the bottom of that ledger we're darn close man I'm gonna move that block your way - just hold on try again that's pretty good for now we might have to tweak it did you guys see me pull that nail out of there cuz I don't know why I did that but I had to put it back in and find the spot okay so we're darn darn close this is the edge of our beam rude you're gonna hold me there fourteen foot four and three eights close here that is bang-on for half fourteen four and three eighths okay and then we're gonna go bring that bring me that level we're gonna go one forty and a half darn darn close Kate and then rude run back there 14 4 3/8 cake go back here we'll double-check remember dad when he weighed the always weighed the animals with that old kronor scale and he had that big metal blob on there and he'd always tap with your finger and as a kid you're just like how do you do dad hey we're gonna go yeah Center roughly rude so taller I guess it's just 14 you roughly Center kids pretty close there it's you so what we're gonna do we're just gonna set those three they're very very close we're not going to worry about the other ones that go in the center of the beams I think we'll get the beam set and get everything kind of secure and then we could fit those legs in or those posts in after so what we're doing right now is we're just gonna attack on a full-length or an over length size joist we're just gonna tack it up flush to the top just go up rude yeah right there we're gonna figure out our post height now you can use we have the six foot level but they're expensive so most likely you're not going to own one of those so just smack one of those in and then roots you get it bang-on level and if not maybe just slightly downhill your eyes downhill your downhill 23 hold on 23 and 3/16 got the post in we'll just verify that this joist is in fact level and like Roode said he's got the eye of the tiger slightly downhill either way we're super close we're gonna do the middle and the end we're gonna get our post Heights then we can set the beams in and then we can fine-tune some things we're just gonna set it to the high side 23 and 1/8 okay how's that look good okay we'll do this last one then where are you get rid right there so one thing I want to see is we have a video on vinyl decks obviously this has deck boards but if you're doing a vinyl deck you want slope so the water runs away but you also want to make sure and check out our other video that the vinyl decking goes up up behind your siding and then the siding goes back over top of the vinyl deck otherwise that's another detail that gets missed and the water just infiltrates the house so check it out so now we're good we can set this beam rude and just kind of tack it into place and we got some joists cut so yeah we'll take this joist down because it's overlaying because we have some flimsy posts I'm just gonna put these as backing you you you saw that I was just tweaking the posts they're all nice and plumb it's still flimsy until we get the joists on now this is called a concealed hanger I'm going to use these on the ends and that way because a lot of times you have a hanger and you gotta like you don't know what to do because the tabs are outward so because my two by ten sitting here I'm gonna set this one here but I need to actually measure my joist and then get this at the right height after we set these later I'll show you our trick and we've learnt this over the years instead of pre installing your hangers we actually pre install our joists we just toenail them in place and then we put the hangers on after and then that way you can get everything nice and level and flush at the top because dimensional lumber is always different sizes this joist is 7 and 5/16 I'm gonna check the other end 7 and 3/16 so 7 and 3/16 on this end so 7 and I'll just mark this other one so I don't forget definitely want to wear your safety glasses doing this yeah I always used to install my pre-install my hangers I don't like doing that anymore saying you got on the pipe right with and you may gotta make sure the bottom is square and and if you have a deck of any size it's probably worth buying one of these because man these are handy so here I got to get my little head down right level with my pencil mark and hope this all works Oh Oh God so scary [Music] so got that concealed hanger-on we have this concealed hanger on now before I get too carried away I'm actually not gonna put these joists in I'm gonna do the next one in because I'm gonna have to shorten this first choice because of the hangers then before I get too far I got to actually do a layout so I think what I'm going to do layout is always important doesn't matter what you're doing you just want we're doing 16 inch centers because our deck boards are only like inch or they call them five quarter so technically they should be for inch and a quarter but they're more like an inch in a one inch to one and an eighth that's why you need 16 inch centers for your joists now remember if we overhang an inch with our deck board we're going to overhang it from the deck ledger and then I'm just going to go we want 16 to the center of our first one so I just go back 3/4 and I'm going to go 15 and 1/4 X on the right so I'm just gonna square that down then I just set my nail so you notice how when i hook my tape I'm gonna hook my tape so that it's on my pencil line so once you move it once you mark your first one and you move your nail you never have to do the 15 and a quarter again I'll show you why the layouts important Rudi's holding me one inch overhang and that's if we want to overhang the deck boards off the ends because we might actually do stairs off this opposite end but if you have if you have an 8 it you can cut an 8 foot deck board so you can cut a 16 in half it'll land on a joist it'll land halfway if you want to cut a 12 a 12 foot lands and if you want to cut a 16 and it doesn't matter you can Center to Center is always the same so you can cut four foots you can cut 80 inches 96 inch anything on the 16 inch Center and that's why your layout is important so you're not constantly going back and having to measure and be like oh man like what your layout has to be once it's set then it just makes life easier and that's what I said earlier layouts always important it doesn't matter what you're doing and I was referring to drywall or framing or plywood or decks anything that has material going on that has a four foot or 8 foot or 12 or 16 foot increment so now when we lay out on the beam I'll show you what to keep in mind now you got to keep in mind remember at the beginning of the video our beam is the length from two by two two by eight so now that I have a layout here I actually for my beam because this location exactly is the end of our beam so I'm 12 and 3/4 now I just hook on the beam 12 and 3 corridor X to this side square that down I'll set my nail and then it's just 16 16 16 16 after that let's see if this works out 12 inches and a beam to that mark hey look at that trough it worked no edits it worked so we know our beams are eight lengths so Rudy and I just landed this Center joist it was the dimension we want now it's starting to get secured we're gonna tag the ends and then we can triple check our square and we'll show you two or three ways to square your deck and make sure before we do that I do want to give you a tip if this deck was any taller we'd want to have some bracing on this beam so it's not flapping in the breeze so this is a turnbuckle this the greatest invention greatest investment we've ever made these are roughly eighteen to twenty bucks that's Canadian I don't know what it is in the US or anywhere else in the planet but these are marvelous what you can do so you can you can take it obviously that's not the right angle you can just screw it to your beam it has if you not that you're gonna have any steel curb pins like this so the steel pin would go in this Center hole here or like most people you could just turn it sideways do a wood stake and then just use these screws and then you just turn this and it adjusts so that way if you had this up high or let's say your ledger against your house is really crooked and wavy you use five or six of these you pin it along your beam but you keep them low enough you keep them down here somewhere so you can run a string line and then you have a string line to gauge your beam from just things like that just super handy tip there go to their rules this joist is just a tad high but I want that some tall kneeling downward and as I suck at it-- it goes down good to go now it should start to make sense why we don't pre hang the joist hangers we just tack all our joist at least two screws each that way if you accidentally step on it doesn't fall down and then this will set it all perfectly we'll get it all squared up and then we'll put the hangers on and it's just way faster way more accurate because now we can get them all nice and flush to the top now this one has less of a gap so I'll keep it a little closer to flush so far so good if you look down the beam it's pretty darn straight next thing we're gonna do remember how I said our string line like our deck is set back 4 and 7/8 we're going to make a mark 4 and 7/8 I'm just gonna put that to the end of the beam and then we're gonna pre pull this string line and just we're gonna double check that and then we're gonna start pulling some square dimensions so we have the string line tight and go look at it at the house there and just see I won't touch it right now what's it look like pretty close it's really darn close it is windy we are going to verify a few other dimensions first and make sure that we're square so I'm going to show you two ways to verify that we're square one method so this is the plan view or the view looking down upon the deck so our joists are gonna go in like this I've drawn the back deck ledger and I've left because we're inch and a half long here and I've shown that just to be specific because in there in real life I'll show you how not to mess it up either there's a couple ways I'll try to run through this quick because we're going to go through it anyway in real life but we can do a three four five so it's a three any increment of three any increment of four and this when it's perfectly square will be an increment of five at these intersections so that's one way or the other way is if you know that this dimension is let's say that one forty-five whatever it doesn't matter what it is as long as this dimension is the exact same as this dimension and from here to here is the same as it is from here to here then you can just do you can measure crossways and each dimension will be the exact same when it's a perfect square okay so we're gonna go through those in real life and we'll see what's what so we're doing the three four five method where I'm budding myself into the ledger now this theory and this way works if the deck ledger is straight and this joist is straight now if you look down the joist is really good but you got to keep in mind if it's a wavy or it's got a bow in it don't do the three four or five because it won't be accurate but the best way to be accurate is to take it as long as you possibly can now I wish we were 12 feet because then my 345 would work perfectly let's see here I'll show you what I mean so if I times ease by I could go inches I could go 30 inches 40 inches 50 inches or what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go I'm gonna times all of these by 3 times 3 times 3 times 3 so 9 12 15 so those are our numbers that we're going to use so I'm going to go 9 this way 12 and this should be 15 so inside-to-inside so 9 feet I'm gonna mark that accurately right there and I like to circle it 9 12 and then Rudi's going to hold the corner of my tape measure on the 9 foot mark yeah you got to make sure you're on the same side of the tape measure I'm about a I'm a quarter inch too tight so I'm quarter-inch less than 15 feet so what that's telling me is that Dex got to go out just a little bit because we're sitting a little bit too tight so we got to extend it so that's the first way and then let's do the cross dimension and just see how close that is because now we have to contemplate if it's got to go that way do we push it out and risk being able to look down the side of the building and have a kicked out or has to be relatively square so when you're doing your deck boards you don't have these weird cuts at the end or any weird where the deck boards don't sit flush the whole way when you're squaring you just want to make sure they communicate well where you're measuring to so that you don't get confused because you can go inside inside outside outside so it doesn't matter now this scenario we're gonna go outside I'm gonna get Rudy to hold me at the two right on the ledger because we have a gap here but hold me right on the ledger root on that mark because remember that mark is the outside of our beam so I'm gonna run over here now like I said I can measure inside-to-inside but I'm gonna measure to the outside of the beam you get there route 31 foot two and a half sometimes what I'll do is I'll actually hold my hand on there just in case I read it funny then if if I'm totally off I'll know that I my hand doesn't move so if something's way off I'll know right away or if I read it wrong good there rules so your hold the two on the outside of the beam at the very outside corner but not on our block right okay I'm not gonna go to the joist that hanger got buggered up because I got scared so I'm gonna go a lot pencil mark on the ledger get there rude holy man I didn't move my hand like I said were maybe a sixteenth of an inch off so I would say that that's bang on the three four or five was a little bit out but this cross dimension is more accurate like I said the sides have to be the exact same length and the beam and the ledger have to be the exact same length because I've had guys do work for me before like I've had guys prep garage pads the diagonal measurement was bang on but the parameter dimensions were all over the place they didn't match so it doesn't matter if the diagonal of matches is but your sides also have to be good to go so we don't have to change anything now we're gonna lay in all our joists it's gonna everything's going to be set true we have to pluck these legs in which that should be pretty easy we'll just find Center in between the already existing legs and then once we get some of that in place because we did two by eights we're gonna do some Midway blocking but I want to show you a few tricks with Midway blocking that make it that is fairly critical you hopefully that makes sense why we set the joists the way we do we can get them nice and tight they're secure enough and then it makes a lot easier to put these hangers on put your goggles on now I'm gonna do a hole that's a little bit away from my finger and then I just want to pull up on the bottom to make sure I have contact along the whole bottom side of the joist so now that we've all that Rudy put all the hangers on I want to do the Midway blocking and then structurally we're done and we're ready for deck boards what I'm gonna do it's called Midway blocking for a reason I'm just gonna go 70 inches rudy marked his 70 inches roots all right good we have that snapped so now we're ready to do Midway blocking we chalked our line the more most important thing about Midway blocking is while we had a break Rudi went and cut these on the miter saw make sure you have nice square cuts because what'll happen is is if you make a bunch of cookie cuts if you can imagine lining up all your Midway blocking along this whole thing and if you do crooked cuts it'll look like that and like that and like that and your because you want this edge to be nice and true and in line so if you do lots of cuts that are bang on miter saw or really accurate with a skill saw then when you install your Midway blocking you screw it not nail it because when you screw it it holds everything tight whereas nails if you jumped on one joist they could pull it out and it could actually kick that joist down and it would stay there so with screws holds everything really tight hopefully I made good sense of that just make sure your cuts are all nice and square now the actual installation of it our first joy space is not going to be 14 and a half every other joy space should be 14 and a half or maybe 14 and 7/16 depending so I'm going to jump out of here and I'm gonna show you what I mean and something to be aware of so what you want to avoid is when you're doing your Midway every three or four rows you want to check to make sure that you're not getting a bulge and all your choice you want them all straight so how you do that is you take from a layout so let's say you get three or four Midway blocks in you start from your layout point and you say okay to the edge of this joist I want to be 62 and 3/8 or this one I want to be 78 and 3/8 whatever that number is then when you check in the middle if you're starting to grow then you cut them to 14 and 7/16 or 14 and 3/8 and you just got to check every once in a while because guaranteed if you put obviously your first starter one's different your first starter one you just measure off of this point not in the middle cuz they're all bowed all the heck so you start here that's your starter basically eleven and a quarter you install that and if you put in fourteen and a half's every single midway and you went to the end you'd be having to force that last joist way out and they would bulge it so that's all I'm saying is you want to check to make sure that this dimension over here or the dimension at the ledger matches your layout down the middle when you're installing your Midway's and if you haven't cut nice and square and true and they're screwed it'll keep that deck nice and straight and what happens is because the reason you want your Midway blocks is so that when your joists are sitting there when someone puts weight on them the bottoms are gonna rattle and if there's too much weight they could spread apart and that's how you get saggy or loose or bouncy so by doing those blocks it'll solidify the deck great up so now I got some blocks in to show you and it makes sense of what I was saying before this is because these are all cut square all of these joints are nice and tight which therefore this will be nice and flat and on the same plane if they were cut crooked and you screw them you'd start having gaps top and bottom and then your joists could actually be creating more of like why I like a wave pool you know what I mean so doing it my width method is the best and for the straightest and easiest install I've staggered them back and forth just to make it easier to screw and now if you watch it'll still have a little side-to-side action button there's no bounce but if I go over it's just a lot I can tell how bouncy it is versus that that concludes a video for today I think I've given you guys a lot of RAM jammed information I'm sorry that if I sped through it pretty quick there is lots of tips in there if you want more info or want other videos made just let me know shoot me a DM or just comment in the video but at the end of it all our deck is nice and square if you look down our beam it is nice and straight and if you just look across the whole deck it's all nice and level there's no waves up and down everything looks really good we're gonna cap this with that outdoor wood that nice two by ten after it's all done and then I'm just gonna let Rudy do the haul the deck boards so that this can get done for mom and dad stairs check out my video on how I did a set of deck stairs and I'll do some more down the road but till then thanks for tuning in

Channel: Kody Horvey

Views: 298,879

Rating: 4.6602907 out of 5

Keywords: how to build a deck, diy deck, outdoor deck, deck framing, how to build a deck by yourself, deck framing tips, up to kode, kody horvey, building a deck from scratch, building a deck from start to finish, deck joist installation, deck joist blocking, deck beams and joists, up to kode carpentry, deck joist blocking methods, how to build a wood deck on the ground, how to build a deck from start to finish, build a deck, how to build a deck step by step

Id: WYvucTdVzxk

Length: 60min 38sec (3638 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 18 2019