How to Build ANY Deck from A to Z!

hey guys jeff from home renovation today we're going to be talking all about decks we got a huge video for you a to z everything you need to learn structure the types of wood the different options you have how to do stairs skirts railings if it's got to do with decks we're covering it in this video so sit back relax enjoy the show i'm going to get the hell out of this windstorm so back in the day when they used to pressure treated decks there were really only two kinds one was a five quarter board which is actually one inch thick and the other one was to use a two by six had the same width the same look just a lot more strength and the reality is if you invested in the two by six pressure treated you got a lot longer lasting deck although when it finally does fall apart it goes quickly this board here it's just rotten now it's time for something new and of course i'm renovating my 1880s farmhouse and so what we're going to do here is take all of this apart back to the original frame we're going to install cedar and in this video i'm going to show you tips for removing for checking the structural integrity how to attach things to the house how to put in your posts how to install cedar there's a lot of information going on here as far as tools and tricks and tips so that you can make this happen at your house and you can have a professional result we're also going to talk about different climates and different humidity how close you are to the ground if you're on the sun side of the shade side everything affects your wood and how you should install it and there's a lot of debate out there so we're going to try to attempt to answer all the questions we've been getting on all of our deck videos in this one video so stay with us i got so much to share with you it's blowing my mind i have to write it all down just to make sure i don't miss anything let's get into this tips for demo first of all if you have hardware like we have on our 4x4 posts over here resist the temptation to try to look like tv show uninstall your hardware all right if you uninstall your hardware you're gonna save yourself a lot of aggravation this stuff is designed to be structural it'll keep a grown man running full steam into that railing from falling off you're not gonna be able to just tear it apart with a sledgehammer there we go so much easier second tip if you're planning on reusing anything take the time to remove it carefully we're not so i don't care third tip if there's anything recyclable that you can keep or give to somebody else do it be smart the environmental thank you ready for this next tip if you're working high off the ground more than four feet tie yourself off so you don't fall off your deck next make sure you use the right tool for the job most decks can be removed and reinstalled and built completely with just a few basic tools like a hammer a decent pry bar and a skill saw resist the temptation to cheap out and use a hand saw for working on your deck like some guys i've seen on youtube i don't know why they want to spend a month working when you can do it in a weekend there we go and listen if you're not used to working with power tools wear some safety glasses use your head but if you're like me and you're used to your power tools you know exactly what they're going to do safety second production first and i don't care what anybody says when it comes time to remove your deck boards bigger is better now you can pick up a wrecking bar like this has a nice wedge on the bottom bad boy like this is about 30 bucks you can get it at the seasonal department at the home depot for best results you can get something like this now this is from crescent tools and you can get this if you click the link in our description of the video we have a link there to go to our website all of our affiliates international tool is where you can find crescent brand and you can get one of these for your deck removal job this is like the strength of three or four people at once love this tool the power of a lever nothing like grade five science class it's under control it's simple you're just using your body weight and anybody can do this remember if somebody else installed the deck with screws instead of nails try backing out the screws as much as possible make your life a lot easier here all right here's my next tip guys when you're building your deck resist the temptation to finish like this with all your boards and then put an end board on because this is what happens you get all these organic stuck in here and it's always wet now we haven't really had rain in this area for a month and then we had a little bit last night there's no reason this wood should all be soaking wet at this point except there's no way for that water to get out of there it's trapped in the dirt and this ultimately is a problem which is why all these boards are rotting okay so when you're doing your decking put your last board on this way with an extension and then underneath you can put something else like a two by four or a one by four all right and have a nice little nosing okay this allows you to put lattice and picture frame and or skirt board gives you a nice finish but now the water is all running off and away and it's not trapping whenever you're doing it like this and you're going over the face you're trapping dirt which will trap water which gives you pre-advanced rot and that makes a 50-year deck become a 20 in a hurry now remember one of my other tips for you is all about the storing and maintenance of your wood when you get it delivered have it stacked neat and tidy on cross bracing underneath so that everything stays nice and flat if you install your wood on the ground and the ground has a warp and it's like this i'm going to guarantee you with the next day you're going to have nothing but hockey sticks sitting in your pile and it'll be useless as garbage so if it's laying flat it will resist the temptation to want to warp do yourself a favor if you're leaving it for more than a couple of days stack it a nice little square tie it all together ah alright so when you're thinking about the design of your deck there are three ways that you can install the post one of them is using one of these end caps and this is a post base and it screws on around the side and on the bottom and then you set it on your deck and you screw it in place now it's the quickest and it's also the most expensive and it's the weakest okay that hardware is going to cost you 20 bucks a post now for 20 bucks a post you should get yourself a bigger piece of cedar now i've seen a lot of guys on the internet and in practice they'll take a post and they'll measure and they'll notch it out and they'll set it on the outside over top of the edge of the board and what that does is it gives you a little bit more space in your deck but as soon as you cut the post to sit sit around the rim joist you're left with nothing but a two by four holding it all up because when you put pressure way up here the wood will split right up that grain line okay as it snaps off it's not a good look if you got a 4x4 use it put it inside the deck and don't just put it to here put it all the way to the base all right now what i've got is i can attach a 2x4 inside of here to the next one and that gives me a lot more strength because now i have framing underneath and in the middle and at the top where the rail goes so we've got three locations where this is all attached together and that gives it no ability to move around in any direction okay it's the strongest it's the cleanest it's the sexiest and yeah you're going to spend a little bit more money on wood but at the end of the day this is a 50-year situation this is only 20 because it traps moisture oh gotta love the smell of cedar in the morning all right i think that's all my tips for the next few minutes we're just gonna rip the rest of these boards out and we'll stop the film if i come up with any other bright ideas to share and you know if you do find a few good boards you can always take the nails out and reuse them prior to the undercarriage because when they're covered by a new wood they aren't exposed to all that moisture and the rotting process pretty much stops right away these are great for cross braces and that sort of thing i'm going to take a couple of them and cut them down and reinstall them real quick tip when you're pulling a nail don't stand over top of it when you pull it a lot of times they'll just and they'll fling right up into your face so you can either leave your thumb on there so you have safety or stand to the side now remember when you're using galvanized hardware and pressure treated lumber you're going to get some decay but that's a good thing because that decay is actually a build up on the nail and it's a swelling and that actually holds it all down even better than was first installed next quick tip is all about the right tool for the job we've got three different hand tools here for pulling nails this one i love for electrical staples can also be used for this scenario you just grab the nail and you're going to use this wedge here to lever against now it takes a fair amount of grip here but this is going to protect you from these nails flying that's not going anywhere right and the lever makes it really easy okay as compared to the hammer which the nail is here but the lever is way back here so that reduces your strength by more than half if the lever was right here consequently again crescent tools go check out our link for international tool to buy your stuff help support our channel look at this all the levers in one little point this is six inches longer than a hammer piece of cake uh average pressure i'm thinking anybody who weighs 50 pounds or more from the hips up can be able to pull these out all day long without getting fatigued works on screws too but those you got to fight with so try to use a screwdriver if you have to yeah all right so one of the things we're doing here is we're trimming back this overhang just a bit but because it's the end of the wood here is a little rotten it was built with these two by sixes on the flat and they were actually the post supports originally way too many nails way too much trap moisture way too much organic so just trimming it off great opportunity to show you a little technique one that i learned the hard way if you put your power cord over your neck and then you cut you can shorten up the length so that the cord isn't dangling in front of the blade i feel like the nature boy ric flair [Music] when you're doing off cuts on your deck always cut from the top down that'll help keep your blade from binding if you cut from the bottom up you're running the risk of everything getting caught up on each other all right and that's how you do it lovely quick and simple and nice and safe it'll extend the life of your tools okay so now that we got this bad boy all skinned off there's a few key components we're looking for one is level are we level now i've heard so many people over the years tell me that you should build a deck with a slope away from the house and can i just say that's the dumbest thing i've ever heard in my life install these boards with a gap so the water can drain through you don't need a slope makes sense the water isn't going to go from one board to the next board and jump the gap the slopes are relevant what you do want to do is make sure you install your boards so that each board has got a slight curve into it so it's not holding water that's important and unfortunately the wood today is cut with such small young trees that there is no rule rainbow or smile or it doesn't work you really have to go board at a time and decide which piece is right for you so uh we'll get to that in a minute when we're installing and i'll show you some of that but what i want to look at now is is everything flat are we somewhat square [Music] but more importantly issues about layout now this is a huge dog leg deck which means i got a huge path down the side and along the side i have a stair nosing area and then a kick out traditionally when you're building a deck the full board needs to be at the stair nosing okay it's kind of like the same rule with your doing tile the full tile should finish at the door where the transition to the next flooring is you can always tell the difference between a professional job and a half-assed job based on the transition from room to room same with your deck if you don't have a full board when you go to do the nosing that means inevitably the homeowner started at the building and worked this way out it is a lot easier to start where it's important those visual lines make sure that that is perfect even if your entire structure that you're refacing is out of square if you start at the stairs and it looks perfect and the eyes of everybody who shows up it's perfect when you get near the house we'll show you later on in the video how to deal with issues if you're not going to finish with a full board that is a simple technique trying to fix it where it's over by the nosing after the fact that's almost impossible it always is a train wreck now what i'm going to do because once i pull that ridge board off which is part of my process we have two different kinds of lumber here alex can you throw me two different kinds of lumber so this is the type of decking that i'm using on the outside of the deck it's a five quarter board which is an actual one inch thick by five and a half inch wide cedar this is the board that i'm using inside the three season porch it's tongue and groove it's basically a two by six that's been run through a mill on both sides to create the tongue and groove effect now because it's that it's an inch and a half it's a little thicker so what i'm going to do is i'm going to install my first board right across the face of my door okay and then add one more piece of this in the door transition which is five and a half inches which is exactly the same thickness as the base plate of an exterior door that's going on my three season porch okay think of the process it'll sit on top of that board exactly the same thickness and then my tongue and groove can butt right up against it and you won't even feel the difference in the height because you're gonna have one inch thick here one inch thick here the door transition on top of it and most people don't step on it they walk over it and they'll land on an inch and a half it'll be such a natural transition no one will even notice that inside the three season porch it's completely closed off floor so not a single mosquito can get in which is the whole point of the idea in the first place so what i'm going to do is i'm going to measure from this location that i want on the door out towards where the stair is going to be i'm taking the rim joists off for now we're going to install the first couple boards take a look at our options but if i have to shorten up the deck so that my my overhang is perfect and then install my rim joist that's what i'm going to do so the first thing for me to do actually hey can i have alex gonna have the drill yeah and lots of spinning going on okay since i'm talking knocking off the ridge the boards are only held vertical at the other end i'm gonna screw all the tops together as soon as i get a new battery this will work a lot better the point of this is attaching it at the top will give it a lot more vertical stability so it doesn't roll over while we're working on it one of the most dangerous situations on the deck is the board roll over okay because it'll just send you flying you can break an ankle you can land awkwardly in the lumber and really hurt yourself and you know i'm a safety second guy you can't be productive if you're laying in the hospital that was funny you okay thanks for the battery bud now one of the best examples of redoing a deck that you can do is right here hey it's not square b it's not the same dimension from the house to the outside corner on either end see the three season room in here isn't square or the right dimension either so you get all the problems of the world wrapped up into one little deck the solution is this it's the line of sight it's the most obvious thing your eyes attracted to and that is going to be right here and right at the door okay everything else i've got systems and sheets that we'll show later in the video how to solve so this board we're going to line up based on the finish and we're going to be adding a small baseboard trim so if you get any gapping it'll be covered that's the secret so we're going to get this and that'll be it now what we're going to do is we have 16 foot boards that are going to be 16 give or take it's going to be a little bit of mercy there we're going to position it in the middle of the joist so that we can make that joint down there we're going to go with a butt joint i know there's lots of conversation so we go square should we go in an angle it doesn't matter okay woods water is going to find its way in that joint one way or another sooner or later if you're really concerned about water working into the joint when you're butting those two pieces of wood together throw in a nice thick bead of pl premium tape the top of the wood shove all that wood together all right and then take a plastic knife and clean it off and then the next day you can take off the tape and trim off the extra glue life is simple right if you have an adhesive strip in there water won't get in between the wood and it won't rot problem solved now like i said let's start with the most visible okay because if i have a full board come to the wall here and a full board go pi and then a full board underneath the door i'm not going to have weird gaps and cracks and weirdness showing and then when i get to the rim joists once i get the last foot and a half i can measure out figure my wood's going to finish i can trim down the board whether the deck is exactly 12 feet or 11 and a half 11 feet 9 inch who cares the point is make it look perfect and that's going to be the goal all right and then when we get close to the house i'll show you how to finish off there as well because it's not going to be perfect there either it's on a nasty angle but we can make that angle invisible we'll show you that too but first we're going to pull out our fastening system the option for fastening down a deck is nails which that's just cheap and quick and lazy surface screws which i hate if you're going to take the time to install a screw don't be stupid surface screws are as stupid as driving a car without oil in the engine all right it's going to get you a little way but sooner or later it self destructs surface screws will rot out your wood faster than just leaving it laying in a pile okay so don't be dumb we're gonna go with the new invisible mounting system it is from national nail a lot of you may know this as camo and the reason i love camo is because when they first invented this system it was a solution to a major problem premature aging we all know that water is the enemy and anywhere where water can collect even a small little bit all right it promotes the destruction of the wood wet wood is rotten wood end the discussion so if you can't keep it dry you shouldn't build it introducing the new camo drive system listen if you guys have been a fan of the channel you've seen other deck videos we use camo there's an old handheld system you can screw from each end and we did a picture frame fishbone deck it's an awesome way to finish the deck we'll put the link to the video up here that might be your style but if you're a contractor or you were able to rent this tool somewhere keep an eye on that that might be a possibility in the near future then you're going to want to know how this operates right you take it out of the box your handle just threads right on piece of cake okay and then what you've got to do is right down here press to release push that boom okay the end comes off nice and easy and it's kind of like an ar you just pull this down grab the bit and this is almost like a like an impact chuck okay you pull it down and you slide in the bit they're color coded based on the t15 or the t20 t15 is all the deck boards and the clips t20 is for the surface screw system that they have for doing the end boards and we're going to show you all of the functionality of this product in this video but for now we're just going to show you how to put your deck together you slide that together bam locked and loaded now you need this bad boy on here all right and you set this up you push this in it sits in the cradle and that's if i'm not drinking there we go all right piece of cake now you see this here this slides it's on a retractable system because it connects to your screws awesome now the camo screws they have a little track system here you just feed it up nice and simple okay it goes around the corner and then you hold it like that all right and then you bring this up here and then the idea is to grab the catch right there bam and that goes under pressure and it pulls the screw into position in the clip okay now it has a depth setter i haven't set the depth yet so i have no idea where it is we'll do that in a second you just put on your regular drill no impact drills available for this one boys and girls so you might have to go buy yourself a tool but here's all this is i take the position where i want to install this thing and then i just drive all right and you'll see that this installs on the edge not the surface when you're screwing like this it doesn't really matter which way your grain on your wood is laying because you're actually pinning down the outside corners of the board on both sides and keeping it from curling up the only other option is the board will curl in the middle and if it does that that's fine it's not the end of the world water will shed but if you have it on brand new wood and you have that nice little smile going okay and you have the the the middle is holding a little bit of water and sometimes you'll see the little thin piece of the grain of the center of the tree will pop out like a huge sliver and that'll catch you barefoot every time so we're going to talk about in just a second how to install your wood but just demonstrating this makes me want to install the rest of the deck this is so quick and easy this is like three times faster than the old system when you do with a hand hand grip okay now the secret of course is in the screw all right all right there's no screw tip it's been cut off and so the tip of that actually bores into the wood all right and so what that does is that dr pre-drills the hole basically as it's screwing in and so it doesn't split the wood you can use this right up to the end of the board okay so we're going to just show you a few different options you're going to get with cedar nowadays because they're cutting younger trees now let's just say it this way the more experienced somebody has in carpentry generally speaking the more older he is the older trees they used to cut for them so there was a different rule back in the day 20 years ago and then there is now and i'll show you why here is a tree this is the middle of the tree right here okay i got a ring here i got a ring here i'm just going to draw on the rings so it's really obvious on the camera okay here we go now okay so you're going to have a hell of a time trying to figure out which side of that board to put up or down back in the day that never happened because the middle of the tree was this freaking huge and they always would cut a 4x4 out of it all right but nowadays the trees are so small they're cutting all the different deck boards out of it now check this out this one has a saw grain in it but it also has a knot so here's the grain here just a little confused hits the nut a little confused hits the nut all right now and this is a more traditional looking board look at that great big grains on this one okay these are lovely now this is an easy way to tell crown and then we have this one there's the center of the tree right there right and this is easier to see on camera i think i don't even have to do this but for the purpose of this explanation this is very valuable stuff so we have four distinctly different looking boards now i could say the old idea was you don't want to install as a rainbow you want to have a smile well here's your smile there's your smile kids here represents the outside of the tree on the bottom okay and that's good this is the way the the old school carpenters say install that board problem being let me show you this now see this grain right here if that's on the surface and it gets wet that becomes a sliver this whole lever piece of wood is going to lift off i know this from years of experience that's a call back waiting to happen and it's not just to call back on hey i got a little splinter it's hey my kid just stubbed his toe on here all right and he got the splinter underneath his nail he's in a hell of a lot of pain i'm really mad at you come back and fix the board and all i do is unscrew it and flip it over now now that i know that's happening i'm installing it like this like a rainbow because i see the center of that tree i see these telltale signs all these silly little grain marks right here these ones are all going to become splinters they're all rubbing out this little thing here that's rubbing out okay up here right there that's going to become a splinter i'm not wasting my time anymore [Applause] so that one gets installed like that all right from now on that's installed incorrectly but it's the right way to do it now this board here is a perfect scenario this one should be installed like this okay you're going to be less likely to have those splinters because there's no core all right this one is more likely to curl this way which puts the screws going down like this going to keep it flat that's a good option and remember if it ever does start to cause a problem you can always unscrew it and flip it over this one well your guess is as good as mine because there's a knot here it's hard to tell so you got to flip it over and take a look at the surface as well okay what's the condition like lots of pits lots of knots this one looks pretty i don't see the propensity for that sliver to happen so i'm gonna say i'm gonna pick that side up for no particular reason other than i like the look of that wood now this one's the center of a tree okay it's got the same potential to twist either direction so you can install it on either side make the decision based on what the surface looks like all right this old school idea of it has to smile throw it out the window okay that was good when they were cutting down big trees it's no good to you today you got to use a little bit more of the cabeza okay all right now let's get back to work okay so now we got our boards up here for installation professional piece of advice we're going to mark all of the ones for the surface up get them positioned and lay them all out first okay that'll give us the ability to identify boards that have got a hockey stick curve to it we can pull it out of the equation and get some boards installed nice and quick so we have some production and then we're going to pull out a tool to fix any of the boards that need to be fixed because there is a way to straighten wood if it's delivered curved you don't have to go back to the store and switch it up we're going to be taking off the pressure treated skirting boards that are here and replacing them with cedar skirt because we want to upgrade everything to cedar so it stains the same but before we put them back on we're going to put in some mineral insulation mineral animals don't use to make nests so even if they can find a way into these cavities they won't mess with it too much so we're just trying to create boards that go all the way underneath to hold that mineral in place there we go i'm over here okay okay now you can see the benefit of buying wood at one of the better suppliers in town all of these boards are just laid in place and we do this just so much easier to identify a warp like when you're in the store and you're trying to buy decent lumber if you put 10 boards on the top of your cart and line them all up you can identify the one that might be twisted just a little bit too much don't be one of these guys that thinks that they can pick out the perfect wood just by eyeballing it and throwing it in the pile 95 of the wood you're going to buy out there has got a little bit of twist to it it's soft wood lumber it grows like this when they cut it it goes like this that's life learn how to build a wall and you won't spend all day long digging through a pile of lumber driving the cost of lumber through the roof because they have to cull all that wood because they'll have to land there like pick up sticks what are you six take your wood go home build something throw the odd one out all right enough of that rant i only have one board here that i think is going to be a problem it's this one and it has a bit of a curve at both ends it's only a quarter of an inch but luckily for me i got the new camo tool for straightening out your deck boards this is designed to put pressure on and torque your board we're going to demonstrate this in just a minute and we'll show you how easy it is to straighten things out here's my workboard i'm going to set it aside until wait for it till near the end now the best way to do this i'll be honest with you this is my system all the time the first board is screwed down right this one yes this one's next i'm going to take this one out yeah and i'm going to put it over here in the hole where i pulled the other board okay now for the rest of the deck all i'm doing is screwing down a board pulling the next one forward and so on and so on and so on it's that simple it's nice simple strategy so you always have somewhere to stand while you're working check this out when i set that in between the boards i can tighten that board up to 1 8 of an inch gap all right if you like a 1 8 gap that's perfect if you want something a little bit thicker because you're really close to the ground and you're expecting the ground moisture to be working its way into the wood and the wood will swell then you can create a little bit more space you can use just about anything as a spacer you can use a wood screw or your square but the point is this is designed for most scenarios this wood's been sitting here for three days climatizing it's pretty much done shrinking i'm not concerned about it swelling i'm more concerned about it shrinking a little bit more over time but it should be just about done so i'm gonna go as tight as i can so you can walk on this deck even after i'm done the stain you can wear your heels and your shoes and ladies aren't going to have a trouble navigating this during a party all right because we are planning on having one hell of a party when we're done this house buy your ticket to my grand opening i need a battery okay i'm just dying over here looking for a battery [Music] oh that's a spot so the only downside to this is i don't want that board tight until after i've screwed this side too the wood itself is actually going to swell when it rains it's going to close that hole up a little bit be perfectly invisible all right so in previous live videos we've showed you how to take a 2x4 screw it on an angle the pressure board shut and that works but it's time consuming this tool is actually designed to do the same thing it's a compression tool you can have it set for single or double joists and you have a wheel that locks underneath and you just use this wheel to manipulate the board shut right let's just taking torque so the further out you're holding this handle the closer you close the board so matt you can set the set the foot on there okay and then i'll just close the board up any driver screw all right piece of cake and that'll work for you all day long for the rest of your life unlike a 2x4 you're constantly adjusting new screws and they're breaking and twisting and causing you issues this is a great tool to have in your arsenal so if you're in the decking business go pick one up all right um let's just go over this real quick because we've got a lot of traffic today i live in the country did they close the highway i don't know what's going on everyone we're gonna finish putting all these deckboards in all right we're going to get to the last few rows and tomorrow we're going to come back and finish this video but for you it is in three seconds so don't leave now we got some bunch of information to cover we've got how to install your 4x4 posts in the corners and in the middle strategy for where to place them and how to create the support around them so the deck boards don't end up splitting up on you um and we're going to show you how to finish at the house beautiful even if you just end up with full boards and then a one inch piece i got a strategy for that we're going to show you how to finish off with a full nosing it's all about having flexibility if you build a deck from scratch you can build it the perfect dimension so the boards fit perfect that math is simple there's tons of documents out there how to do that but if you're fixing somebody else's deck and you don't have that strategy in place then you've just got to take a minute and think things through what makes the best sense for the visual lines and then feel free to take the rim off and cut the joists trim things up the way that it's gonna finish nice for you because the finish is what sells the house okay not the surface it's the edges okay well it is day two on my deck build it is a scorching what do we call this 32 feels like 105. no big deal we're going to just try to get as much done as we can today but we're going to show you really a ton of options listen if you're resurfacing a deck that means you most likely didn't build it in the first place and so you aren't working from a drawing you don't have a plan nothing is mapped out for you you're just going to have to deal with what you got so what we're dealing with here is i'm going to show you my techniques my tips and my tricks for mapping out and creating a design on the fly right that maximizes the overall look when you're finished and helps to eliminate you from having to be a master carpenter the secret here is to be able to build something that looks beautiful that's actually quite simple to do so i'm going to give you a whole pile of my tips and tricks so that you can do all that as well first of all we've got these boards installed and we've started our design with that that's great but i need to know how i'm going to finish this project so i'm laying out these boards and i'm throwing on a little bit of spacing just to mimic what i'm dealing with and i'm looking right here i've just got a little bit of meat left now my plan is to add a great big rim joist okay and that's inch and a half but even at that i'm only two inches of wood all right it's not even half a board and i know some people are gonna be like well that's fine you just rip this on a table saw you're good to go but can you imagine walking up the stairs over there and the stair nosing is a two inch piece of wood or we put a full one here and a two inch piece inside it it's just gonna look stupid so what you can do is instead of cutting your wood down to fit the space and throwing it in the garbage i added an extra couple pieces of wood so i've got a 2 by 10 i'm going to put on here i'm going to add a by six onto that that makes it three inches and since i'm using all nails here this is gonna work fine and then i'm gonna add a two by four wow i can actually extend this the the depth of my deck by four and a half inches here which is really kind of cool because my post is going to go here but my decking is going to stick way out crazy when you think about it but it's going to work it's going to look awesome i don't have railings on the other side over here because that is a real gradual stepping okay it's just like four or five inches at a time i'm not worried about it i'm gonna have stairs and railings here so this is gonna work great it's gonna give me a beautiful look over there and i'm happy so alex let's just get this installed buddy there we go so just a quick trick when you're working with older lumber and it's got a bit of a twist the nail gun might not close it for you so you can take a wood screw and you can close the gap because it should pull the wood right over the shaft of that nail that's about the best we're going to get once it stops pulling just stop you go any deeper than that you're just going to start coming out the other side but that is a lot nicer to work with so what i want to do is nail it in there first okay i'll hold this end of it so you just grab the gun don't worry about the middle go ahead and nail that oh this is a great measuring system right here let's put that on the saw and uh yeah just slide it towards me actually by the time you even get out of that hole i'll have this thing cut straight through the face into that okay just two is good go a couple of feet over there and let's tie all that together you can see that you can manipulate the end of the board to create flush right [Music] that was lousy that was better yeah same thing this board's actually in really good shape so you go ahead and and flush off your ender and i'm pretty happy with that there you go and you'll see the secret when screwing is when you're tightening up the screw the head might disappear in the wood right so when you're putting in a screw that's how far the screw's going in that's when the head's at the surface but watch what happens here even if you're pushing it'll open up now i'm at the surface okay until it stops tightening you've got to screw because there's a density in the wood and until the head creates enough compression that it actually closes that gap you're not done right whenever you're tightening on something with a screw you always got to get rid of the gap so this represents our spacing we had ourselves about a quarter inch all right and here's my new deck board so now i'm going to be starting all of this board is going to be sitting on this overhang now i got structural nails in here i got structural nails in here and then i got screws attaching that board now each screw carries 80 pounds as long as we've got a handful of screws over every few feet like four or five it's more than enough to carry the load that we're attaching because the board contacts this middle piece as well so now i've got three quarters of an inch of overhang and that profile we'll call it is going to go all the way down that deck across the staircase and it's going to look perfect when we put the stairs on while he's finishing that i'm going to grab some 4x4 posts and we'll start putting in our railing system all right now here's where we get to have a little bit of fun we're putting in our 4x4 post and i've seen lots of guys out there who will mount them to the top of the deck we've talked about that earlier in the video i've seen guys cut them they'll add the depth of this plus the wood here and then they'll cut their height up to 42 plus maybe an extra inch okay so they can put a post cap and still get a 42 inch railing all these measurements are important but i'm going to go step by step so you know how to decide how you're going to do it this is sitting right on the ground and generally speaking that's fine except we don't want ground contact okay that means wicking of moisture and in a in a four season climate like ours it also means frost so we want to have it about an inch off the ground all right i'm going to mark that so what i'm going to do is i'm going to just visually show you everything we're going to do i'm going to map it out and measure it out on this lumber so that you have all that information available now you can use this at your place at home but if you just make that pencil mark then you can attach the board to it now it's going to hold it in position for you it's like an extra pair of hands now what we want is a 42-inch handrail okay because that is the code in our area that means from the deck surface to the top of the hand rail is 42 inches now the deck surface to the is 42 but the deck itself is one inch so we're going to add another inch to there okay and on top of this this is our post you want the post extending higher than the rail if you're going to put any kind of post cap on there which is necessary because don't forget if you expose this end of the wood to the weather okay then that's going to get rot and split and crack and destroy your lumber so the reason we put post caps on even if it doesn't have a function if it's just a wooden block is to protect the wood in in the post you can always get something decorative solar lighting we can talk about that later but for now let's just get this if this is my handrail all right visually you want to decide what do i want because a lot of post caps have about an inch and a half or two inch cover so knowing what you want is actually important if you're not sure what you want leave it long on purpose and you can cut it later but the point is if you do all the math now you can do this on a chop saw it'll be a perfect clean cut and you won't have to be out of the reciprocator or a skill saw later and make a mess of everything it's kind of late in the program when you figure out what post cap you want to start pulling out power tools so we're going to add three inches for my post cap don't go anywhere buddy here we are right so visually i'm thinking that's nice i'll have my post cap material and i'll still have a bit of a rise above my rail so that works good for me so now my measurement is this one for the thickness of the wood because i'm installing the post in the frame 42 for the height to the rail plus another three right 46 inch now that's from my pencil mark okay ah so here we are we're gonna cut this bad boy at 46. okay now for you for the whole deck if your post is going all the way through the ground that's how you do it if you're going to be cutting your post so that it's just going inside the frame then take your 46 measurement right that takes it to here and then add the height of your choice package right should be about seven seven and a quarter so that'll take you to 53. once you've got that number you can go to the saw and cut all your posts so you just pick the ones that are going to the ground get these specific because ground slope every one of them will be different do the block set the height add the 46 keep your gap underneath for frost and to avoid ground contact and then you can cut all the posts at the same time and install all other rim piece of cake [Applause] so now we're just gonna throw in a couple of screws in position so that we can level off the post we're gonna go in high to the right and one low to the left [Music] that one we're only gonna embed into this wood and not drive to the cedar also going to come in at this point [Music] on an angle and down here [Music] so now we can get the level and we'll be able to make it plum plum in both directions so before you start doing your post adjust your expectations okay wood is not straight and when you use a long level like this you'll realize that the value of this because it has a little bit of movement the goal here is to get it as close to plumb as possible and the longer your level you use the better you'll be able to get that figured out sooner but here's our bubble anytime you're working with exterior wood getting that bubble in between the two lines just consider that good don't try to make it perfect you won't be able to it'll never happen and it'll keep moving over time so just take some pressure off yourself trying to be perfect and just get it as close as you can and be happy and it's going to look amazing so we're okay so for whatever reason today it sounds like they're building a new city just down the street so it's going to be a little noisy so bear with us what i want to do is i want to check both plumb lines before i start attaching fasteners in case there's a massive adjustment to be made the way this is sitting i need to push the top in a little bit okay fine and this one's sitting i want to push to this way a little bit that's actually much more aggressive so here's how we're going to do this i want the post to go this way which means i'm going to open up a gap back here so i'm going to open this up a little bit and then drive the screw okay [Music] there now i'm in charge okay so now i'm intentionally out of level and every time i torque the screw i'm pulling it back towards the rim now i've got the perfect line here set up so now i can go to this side all right so since i want to go this way a little bit i'm going to intentionally open up my gap up here and then drive my screw in okay now i've over compensated so i can i can just tighten it back into position that's how you make it perfect every time if it has to move over compensate then drive your screw into the wood and then use the screws in order to pull it back to where it want you want it now that i've got it there i can just start driving other screws in to tighten it all up now there's other options you can do here if you want to make them additionally strong you can add blocking between the post and the next joist or you can cut a block that goes from joystick joists behind it all these things are possible you can include whatever degree of paranoia you'd like to now if this is an outside corner all the extra blocking isn't necessary because you're making a triangle and it's an incredibly strong structure but since this is going to be taking the handrail that's only going to be attached to the stairs i need this to be rock solid i need to be able to stand here with all my strength not be able to move this that's actually not too bad but i'm going to put a block in anyway so basically by just by doing that and we'll throw a couple screws in to hold it we've now made it impossible for this post which extends past that brace to t turtle so now if you're moving this you're moving the whole deck you're never going to make it as strong as like it's built in concrete because it's just hanging here but it's going to be really really really close all right now we have to go over a couple of other options here [Music] now if you want to try to compare this to any kind of surface mounted rail system and then make them there's tons of them aluminum railing systems little caps that screw into the wood those screws are this long right and it's just a little bit of thread that's in the actual wood and if any water sits on that wood at all it's going to soften up and you're going to lean on one day and it's just going to rip right out of the surface of your deck it's unsafe i don't know why they ever even approve them now real quick we're going to take some time and put these deck boards down we did run into an issue yesterday i thought i'd talk you through over here we have 16s and we have 10 foot and our deck is about 25. so we have cutoffs we have to land on a joist and what we decided is if we started running 10 foot from the end coming this way we'd have to hit this joint here and i'm going to have one two three boards that'll have a joint right in the walkway at the door that's stupid hey it looks ugly but the higher the traffic area the less you want to have a joint so what we did instead is we offset this we put the joint here then we'll put the 16 and then the off cut can be put on the other end now it gives me two joints but in just a minute i'm going to show you my trick because i know how to put a joint together won't rot prematurely and it's going to make you look like a superstar no cedar deck job would be complete without some pl premium it's your outdoor exterior adhesive and here's why we've seen in other videos wherever somebody puts a joint any water that goes in that joint is on the joist has nowhere to run and as a result it uh encourages premature rot now if you're going to end up using surface screws then you don't care about premature rot you're going to get it from the screws but if you're using camo then your expectation is this deck should last a while dude where this tape begin guys can you just start the first into the tape without adhesive maybe here we go what we want to do is we want to put pl premium in that joint okay but not on the surface of the duct boards so we're going to use painters tape for this purpose you know i never use it to paint but i do use it on other occasions the goal is this this adhesive does three things it bonds the wood together two it'll actually help to make a good bond with the joists underneath so you don't have to rely on a bunch of fasteners on the end here number three it'll waterproof the joint ha ha i know it's crazy watch this it's almost the same color as the cedar now what am i using the ultra yeah um the regular peel premium is got a more brown color to it but this stuff is going to do the job just fine so we put in a healthy bead and then we're just going to compress the joint by pushing it together until it comes out all right here we go now we're ready to screw it in there you go now you can take the bit okay because the ends are cut off you're not going to split the wood and i'm going on an angle about an inch away on a 45 degree angle down but also on about a 22 degree angle in so i can catch get it started there we go now i'm going to catch that joist line but i'm going to finish through [Music] it's still a hidden fastener and i know there's no gap here because the wood that was put on the deck yesterday was exposed to the wind and it actually shrunk up a little bit where the rest of this was in a pile there we go so i'm measuring a post notch here it's gonna be a bit of a trick because the board actually goes underneath in the gap but the idea is this post is three and a half inches by three and a half inches not perfect every time not always perfectly square neither is your deck neither will be your cut so if you cut it three and three quarters okay and make that your dimension you're gonna have just enough mercy and wiggle room that when you're sliding it in it's not gonna have issues and swelling and compressing and then split and crack the whole board off afterwards you want it to go in nice and comfortable but you've got to have blocking okay if people step on this board here when there's that much cut away this will just split right down the middle so we want to add blocking in here and then we can pull out the jigsaw and trim this up the blocking will also reinforce this post which will be nice if you're not familiar with using a jigsaw you should because this is the kind of precision tool you need to work out here now if you've got one of those expensive multi-tools you might be able to get away with using that but this is not a place for circular saw you really want to have a perfectly straight up down clean cut at the corners and here's how and don't pull it out your blade will bounce off and make dents in the surface of your wood don't push too hard let the blade do the work now once you've got it cut you can start a semicircle jigsaw blades have this ability to bend left to right when you're cutting depending on the kind of pressure you're putting at this point in the wood so when you're cutting if you're pushing your saw like this your blade will be off it'll be happy once it gets stuck going up and down like that even if you're not pushing against it anymore it'll just keep on cutting on an angle and then when you try to slide this in it won't fit so make sure you're being real cautious of the angle especially when you're coming back from this side okay i almost want to start on an angle like this just to get underneath that it should look like this when you look down at the hole you don't see the wood sticking in okay there we go that's how to cut a hole one on one so first rule of sit working with cedar every time you make a cut you have to sand don't save all this work to later or you won't have access to it so thanks everybody for all of your uh input we did the questionnaire should we do a pool or a hot tub came back with the idea that in this location for this house it's more of a grown-up fun in the sun kind of environment so we're going with hot tub because we only get the sun for three weeks a year bottom line a hot tub can be used year-round a pool can only be used for a few short weeks in the summer time so we just feel there's more value and benefit to the value of this property by having a hot tub in this location if i lived further south even down in the london area i'd probably have a different attitude and want to have a pool but because we are where we are that's just a harsh reality so we did a little searching online last night we were looking at hot tubs and you know you've got all your traditional great big square ones with all the plastic sides and 8 000 jets and that's not my style i just want to sit in the tub on a bench have the water bubbling a little bit have it hot and relax work my muscles right so we're found this company that makes round hot tubs out of cedar yeah right cedar deck cedar hot tub it sounds perfect to me so we decided to bring it off the corner over here and what we're going to do is we're going to extend these floorboards beyond and not cut them down and wait until we have this thing on site so we can kind of scribe it and roll it in and then we'll build a little step off into it right about here okay right off the corner so if that's the way we're going to do this then i'm going to want to handrail i need about a couple of feet i want a handrail around here this will be our next post all right yeah yeah so i want to go use the same measurements that i have been all along be right back after i measure and cut this i'm going to run through a couple of options right now for handrails because there are a certain number of pre-approved handrail designs that every city or municipality is going to have in their building code this is where it gets really strange everyone because they're gonna say you can put a two by four top and bottom rail and then one two by twos and then add three screws on each of them and that's safe and all of that contraption is gonna be screwed into these posts with a screw there and a screw there at each corner and the truth is that's only 300 pounds of shear strength on the whole railing but if you run into one side a little tipsy one night having a great cedar deck party when you're all finished renovation like i'm gonna have then that's dangerous so there are options now if you wanna go with a glass railing system then you can get away with putting in pressure treated posts that'll save you some money and veranda is a company that home depot is selling their stuff with they make post cap sorry post sleeve covers right and that's cute right and when you start seeing this go together you're like wow that means i can cut a bigger hole and i don't have to worry about it these things just snap together need a hammer here okay right piece of cake there's also a cap for it but the point is is the company that sells these also has aluminum top and bottom rail systems okay and that rail system you can go with spindles or you they actually sell a tempered glass at the home depot that fits inside of that and from what i remember they come in four or six foot lengths and as long as you don't have more than three inches of space on each side of that glass it's acceptable to code they've had the engineers come in and improve their design and their installation systems and they got parameters so that you can actually do that as well so there's an example of a system that's being sold in a store that has paid for the engineering to be approved even though it's not a part of the building code all right i know it gets a little bit strange but for me i'm not putting glass in i'm going with a black spindle we're going to keep it very very rustic very organic because we're going to put in a cedar hot tub and so we're going to just go with cedar cedar cedar cedar cedar okay and we're going to go with the black spindles so let's get rid of this all right so now we're gonna deal with the railing but i'm not actually gonna install railings today i gonna finish all the decking on all the posts before i start doing railings because you change the tools you change your systems it's nice to have a little bit of system in place but i am going to go through the last few steps so that you have all of my cheats at hand and you've got all that information first of all we installed all these posts plumb which means the width at the bottom 53 and a half should be the same at the top whoop bit of three and a half perfect so what i'm going to do is i'm going to cut myself a 2x4 that's 53 and a half and i'm going to install it on the top in two different locations in each post because this is cedar and we've only attached screws in the side and the top of this will twist independently if you don't tie it together we're heading into a weekend it's going to be a few days before i get back here to do these rails so i want to make sure that i'm teaching you how to prevent having a 50 post get all twisted up and ugly on you because you don't want to get this far come back in a few days after you've been away for a weekend and see everything in the building has gone like that that's maddening because now you have to disassemble everything including the decking surface just in order to fix your posts there's no amount of force in the world that's going to go and undo that corkscrew effect so by putting on a two by four we'll stop it from even happening this is a cheap three dollar two by four perfect time to use scrap lumber so here we are putting on my little top plate temporarily now i'm using four screws and i'm near the end and we haven't shown this in the video yet it's one of my oldest secrets but it's called i call burning the screw so here i've got the screw partially started i'm gonna put the drill on reverse and go backwards and i'm pushed down while going backwards and actually gets really hot and burns the screw in and that keeps the wood from splitting i don't care we could do this all day long on a thousand pieces of wood up to a millimeter from the edge of the board if you use a system it'll never fail okay now i am exactly flush and flush i can grab the other end of the wood watch this and i can manipulate how straight that board is so what i'm going to do is just bring it over here it's exactly the same measurement as the width on the bottom i'm going to install this and i'm going to keep them from twisting i'm going to keep them from warping so when i have my finished railing system finished and ready to be installed all i do is unscrew this and i can slide it in place into something that's level and square you know some of you might think this is a little overkill to be honest at 30 40 50 a post you don't want to make a mistake now i'm going to show you a little tool that i haven't used on the channel wow five years max we've been filming i've never pulled this out chalk line crazy this is just sitting in my toolbox make sure there's actually yeah we got a little bit of shock in there too that's good man it's been a long time since i've used this ever since i pulled out the laser this this bad boy here is probably seven or eight years old anyway we're going to just use this to establish a line that i'm going to cut one of the benefits of installing your posts on the inside of your your your ledge is that the width of the saw from the the side here to the blade is less so that you can actually put all your wood and overhang it and then trim it all once at the same time now i am just checking my number here i am cutting it off at an inch and a half and a hair so i can go to three inch so we're just going to pull its bite boom there's my line there we go now the secret with this is uh get this out of your way because the back end of this will actually catch on the wood and everybody always makes a mess when they do that hold on with your finger get right on that line now the chalk line is usually about the same thickness as the blade and when you're cutting in this direction you're actually cutting from the edge of that metal and to the right the thickness of your blade so since i don't want to do that i'm going to use this little notch here i'm going to use that right on the middle of my red line all the way down and i'll have the little bit of red line left when i'm finished and it's so important because you can't do proper skirting if you don't have a bit of an overhang we'll get to that in a minute now do you see what i'm doing here i'm taking my sponge i'm cleaning up it's kind of like cleaning your teeth you know going right in between all of these getting all those splinter fibers out of there you're gonna sacrifice the odd sponge doing this but it's so worth it if you're gonna cut something make sure it looks pretty when you're done and if you have an electric palm sander that's a great tool as well for finishing off just use a light gauge sandpaper like a 220 and don't go overboard cedar is a really soft wood and you will absolutely bevel it with a power sander if you're not being careful now you can see that's not perfect right it's not perfect there's a little bit of but the point is is every board is cut exactly the same spot at the edge of the board okay and that's what that system uses even though it was free hint i'm not using a track saw or any craziness just steady guide and it gives you a really nice finish i could have hired nasa geniuses to show me some sort of rig to get a perfectly straight cut and tomorrow when it's all shrunk a little bit they'll all be different legs anyway [Laughter] what i'm showing you is a really easy system remember when we were taking the deck apart the end was over overlaying all of these boards it was capped it was trapping stuff what we're gonna do is use our 2x4 like a bit of a structural load here okay up underneath now it's still got an eighth of a lip which is nice detail it uh it's good texture but it's super strong now the distance between here and the ground is 24 inches give or take all right so the idea here originally was i could put this board on like that and then i could install lattice right up on right up to it okay and i'm good because the way we installed our framing and all of our posts look at this i can install a two by four connecting all the posts and have a nailing surface for lattice top and bottom right that's a real quick simple way and if your ground is contoured you can install whatever design you need and then have a flat surface that keeps everything nice and square around the deck and you can just put a two by four here and then lattice the difference right and at the very bottom one of the things we can do is you can take one of your five quarter board and you just take your skill saw cut it in half now you have a trim board just like our shed program if you want to see how we built our shed you can click up here but you can actually use pieces of five quarter board ripped in half and make trim board and like picture frame it but what we're going to do is a little different because i'm a glutton for punishment i'm at the home depot and i'm looking for neat ideas something different because i don't want to build every deck to look the same as the last deck i don't want my deck to be just like everyone else's dick it's australian in case you're wondering you say it right it's kind of funny all right here we go this is a two by four foot panel they have this new privacy screen panel series they have a black rail and you just slide a few of these in place and you can make a privacy wall and they got different patterns and decorations i just picked this because it's horizontal and it's kind of simple and i'm like wow if i picture frame this and then just stick it on i can just put one panel here one panel here one panel there done 12 feet sounds about perfect doesn't it so what we're gonna do is use the table saw and we're gonna make a picture frame for this thing and we're gonna put a table saw groove in it and my two by four so i can actually encapsulate this to provide some strength and of course everyone's going to want a miter joint right max let's visualize middle of the whole middle of the hole meld the hole in the middle of the hole oh it's so much easier to measure when you're visualizing okay mojo milo there we go that's going to represent our finished product okay now i've got my outside measurement for my ends so my visualized dimension is 29.5 that's my outside point that also means now i know the difference between the product and my wrap so i can take that minus the actual measurement i'm plus five and three quarters larger so now i can take my actual measurement the other way and cut my lumber five and three quarters larger so that makes it 53s all righty it's important when working with a table saw to not be stupid this will hurt you you want to push based on the sound so if you're wearing those big sound protection ear muffs you can't hear a damn thing you don't want to hear the motor working too hard or you got to slow up if you know it's working way too hard lift it off the blade you might have twisted something just like this [Music] bad bad good now that i've cut the groove there's not as much resistance so you can run this through the saw a lot faster we're gonna go three different widths to make it nice and wide to receive our material [Music] so now i'm gonna cut miter joint picture frame for all of this let's see if i this would be a shame to go through all that work and then i go oh yeah that makes sense i should have done it this way what do you think alex got any faith in this buddy you might be at home wondering what the heck is he doing there's no pencil mark or anything on that wood i know it cuts in between these two right so then i just lift the blade the protection device and what i'm doing is i'm just closing one eye and i'm basically drawing a line down that blade and making sure it connects right there on the corner of that wood in it's about as close as you're ever gonna have to get demonstration of the craziness that i call my life yeah i think we're gonna have a little bit of mercy here too nice hold that we'll try that and we'll go from there okay now let's go to the four corners make sure they're nice yeah you don't wanna start assembling all this until you've double checked alrighty there we go now remember we want to have the bottom of this deck basically same depth from the post as the top then we can install this flush and same rule goes here don't go right on the ground give yourself an inch okay and this is not really all that structural but if you want to put in two screws to keep it from twisting why the heck not it using this reverse screw system is the key to success here you got two options buy some electrical tape so when you do put a hole in your hand you can just pat yourself up or you can pre-drill the hole [Applause] okay now the secret before you start your skirting is you really need to identify what you're going to do on all four sides so remember we used a cedar piece here to identify our outside corner so i'm going to actually take this piece flush with that outside corner i doubt i'm going to go through the time and expense of building screens like this to go behind a bush so i'll probably just use a piece of lattice or maybe a couple pieces of skirt board they make a product that's 5 8 thick that's designed for fences out of cedar it's a perfect accompaniment to closing off pieces of wood and that sort of thing the reason i love this is because it gives air flow okay i'm going to be using one of these for my stairs now i want to get a three-step again supply issues going on at the stores but the idea here is this will attach just underneath the deck okay right here all right bam done stare stare stare it'll work when it all comes together and because it's gonna be black metal and then just just treads no risers so it'll be empty everyone's gonna see behind it right so this way the whole length of the deck from the parking lot when you look at it you'll see the entire design all the way across because the stairs will be hollow and i think it's just going to be spectacular look right there now just keep in mind doing something like this is going to run you wow almost 12 is a linear foot for skirting if you just go out and buy the deck boards they come in five eights okay so the the cedar fence boards are six bucks a piece for a six footer maybe even more and one six foot board will do three feet twice so that's like one linear foot so it's six or eight bucks a linear foot anyway so you might go oh that's expensive but what's your option the lattice is expensive that is also gonna be running you almost ten dollars a foot for cedar lattice the point is this when you build a deck and you put in a pressure treated structure as soon as you decide to finish the cedar you're not just buying the cedar fence the the decking boards you're buying the posts you're buying the trims you're buying the skirts you're buying the steps all of those details is where the money is and it shows remember if you put cedar on instead of pressure treated you increase the value of your house exponentially by doing the work yourself and that's why we're here to help you learn how to do this yourself so you can make it pretty and make some money now i know you might think this video is almost done but oh my goodness there's so much more to go i'm going to show you four different ways to build stairs yeah four and then we're going to show you how to do the railing system we're also going to install a couple of pieces of tracks and show you the brand new hardware that works with the camo screw gun it's going to change your world if you're doing a simple flat surface deck and you're not doing all the accoutrement then this might be a great way to go at about it you can put down a trex deck on a like ground surface deck probably just in an afternoon without any real serious work you'll pay more for material but like i said if you're just doing something simple get good quality materials and make it look valuable alright so we'll do all of that and then we're going to answer some of the most popular questions that we've got in the deck videos over the last few years because there's just so many questions and so many people with different understandings of how things work i want to try to get all that information in this video don't you dare go anywhere and if you learn anything so far hit the like button if you haven't hit it anyway and help a brother out we'll see you soon all right so we're just going to take a minute and we're going to show you a few of the options you have for hardware when you're doing your decking and the differences in it here's a traditional three inch decking screw those are three inch traditional deck screw and this is the camo screw and this is the one that's designed to go off the edges okay and again it stops the upward force okay when it's on an angle so it doesn't need a big head these ones are surface screws they go straight down and the head itself is what keeps things from lifting up so they're two different options the thing is with camo is they used to be the camo tool and the camel screw was very specific to itself and you couldn't use the tools aside from the hardware and it didn't have a lot of flexibility the new camo drive system that came out has a lot more flexibility so we're going to go through some of the options now first of all this is how we install decking screws right it's a surface just past the surface and you've got to be very careful that you're not going to slip off the screw okay and end up putting a dent in the wood right next to it unfortunately if your bits aren't good that's what happens all right or if you're not used to drilling it can be quite a wear and tear on this on the deck surface so what we're going to do is we're going to show you the new camo drive deck surface screw so now we have let me i'm going to show you here all right it's got thread on the bottom and then smooth shaft on top and here's the new camo surface screw all right now it's threaded in one direction for pulling down and then the top of the screw is actually threaded in the opposite direction and it pulls the board down all right so it gets an even a tighter grip into the deck surface underneath so if you have a little variation in your in your joist this screw will pull everything nice and tight it also doesn't have a pointy tip it bores its own hole which means if you ever seen me do that old trick where i can drive a screw in the end of the wood and everybody knows that's going to split but if you burn it in reverse it doesn't split right the camel screw doesn't split either watch this right near the edge and that doesn't split either okay no there's nothing to grab onto so it doesn't pull all the way tight i'm just going to demonstrate real quick what this looks like when it grabs into a joist right that is a really nice solid screw now of course it's going to come in different color options depending on the kind of lumber you're using i always like to go with the brown screw because you know over time all the pressure treated colorant fades out and you're left with brown wood but the idea is this not only do they give you a surface screw but now you have it in a screwdrive system which is brilliant really so in order to do this we got to change the bit oh okay and we select then this and then this just works like on the other drill bit set that in place put this all back together boom all right and we need a different tip now this is again is new to me max there we go now the tips in place feed the screws in here again okay here we go and we bring it around the corner and then grab it like this slide this up and then peel this over until it catches there we go all right now it's on under compression it sets the screw piece of cake right once your driver system's in place we can attach our drill now i've got surface screws on a self-feeding system and i can avoid crawling around doing my decks so if you want to use the surface screw you can item has an automatic stop on it and if you find that's too deep you can adjust the depth with this thing right here i'm finding it it's too deep so i'm going to get dramatic and go like that just so we can see the difference all right that didn't go in enough oh wow that was dramatic [Music] not quite not quite that's where i like it just beneath the surface so that's really great for doing uh surface screws or if we're doing the edges right because you can't just use a regular camel screw straight down on the edges it'll peel off and warp so you might want to grab some of these that's awesome okay next up we're going to show you the system for installing trex in case you're using this kind of material composite with the groove i'm telling you right now this is gonna be amazing all right well if you're a fan of my channel then you've seen that most of the work i do is with wood i have not even yet installed a composite deck on our youtube channel but i am very familiar with the product and how it works and i have done composite decking in the past i am partial to wood for the following reason i find it stays cool and it's a hell of a lot cheaper to install now if you live in a place where you get a return on your investment with composite decking and you have a beautiful backyard living oasis that you want to build it's fabulous for evening parties and cocktail parties and that sort of thing so i'm not disparaging it as a as a rule of thumb but i am going to say this if you're not in the market for composite each one of these 12 foot boards is 50 bucks all right that is a real big chunk of change so you're more than doubling the cost of your material just for the surface of the deck and they make a claim that it lasts pretty much forever and i guess that's true except i was recently in miami and we were on a deck that was made accomplished around the pool and it had buckled and warped and melted and it was just a disaster and it was only 15 years old now granted that's a lot of sunshine maybe that wasn't fair and i don't know what the surface underneath it was like it probably wasn't getting a whole lot of air but for for me and my liking i like wood but i am going to show this because i know there are people out there and they're going to want to know how this system works and if you are going to go with this kind of material i'll tell you right now it's fabulous install you're never going to have any surface screws if you plan in advance okay this kind of material is all about planning now i should also mention for everybody out there i don't know how to break into this box there we go [Laughter] i love it when they make me look stupid someone help me with the child proof lock please all right here we go it's a screw people not bullets all right um here we go stainless steel it's an option and you know what one thing about camo every time they sell hardware they always sell the bit that goes with it you never have to ask yourself ooh do i have the right drill bits always with the hardware now stainless steel screws are amazing when you're working with this kind of stuff if you're going to go surface screwing because a little bit of steel showing on edges and that sort of thing when you're trimming up is always a lot better than trying to find something else to work okay stainless just always looks good and it never changes color and it won't rust now let's take a look at this i just installed two edge clips and the idea is you slide your board into it there now that side's attached to the deck it's not going anywhere but if you're going to keep going with this no surface screw system okay then you got to do this this is where it's really a lot of fun okay you put it over the joist slide it into the gap okay that's it all right and so we'll just show a demonstration of this that's why i bought this board as a demonstration ridiculous this is how you install your whole deck all right put all your clips in and then you keep sliding your boards and sliding your boards and pushing and pushing and pushing then when you're all done you can screw them all down now the package comes with this and this is a great little gizmo right what does is it takes the screw head and it fires into the center and it automatically sets your sets you up all right you can just take your drill and it'll automatically put you right into the screw bit every time so you can just kind of there's my screw there's my hole oh did you hear that i don't know how far to go let's see what happens oh that was it that was done it was that easy wow and you can do that by hand or as i'm about to show you now you have the other option you put the right bit in your gun for your camo drive system and you can stand up like a grown-up and while you're sliding all of your deck boards together someone else can be walking behind you and they've got the tip that does the same thing it always finds the top of the screw head right so it doesn't take a lot of intelligence to do this done that's pretty brilliant now can you imagine if you had a couple thousand square feet of deck to do with this right you're just standing up drilling away nothing to it right anybody can put clips and boards together it's really kind of funny because generally the rule of thumb in life is the more expensive the material the more confident the installer needs to be but in this case this is a really expensive material and it's kind of like the simplest installation system around doesn't take any brains it doesn't give you any screw surface i love it where to go camo that's a great tool so here we go we got something that can do all kinds of building material clips edge surface deck traditional camo i'm loving it and this thing is durable this is like i don't know steel carbon fiber i don't know what it is and this is amazing loving this tool thanks campbell for sending this over for us to demonstrate appreciate it guys and listen if you're going to be doing a lot of decking in your world or you can probably go to home depot nowadays and rent something like this i would suggest it this is a great product and it gives you a lot of versatility so we are covering a ton of information in here about surfacing your deck but what if you're in a situation where you have yet to figure out how to attach to your house because most people do it wrong they cut corners they cheat or if you have an existing deck you're going to resurface and some of your structures a little bit shall we say sketchy we're going to give a couple cards up here you can click these links and you can find more information about decking that's related to that situation but for the rest of this video we're going to focus on finishing the deck so now we're going to jump into the handrails then we're going to show you how to do stairs three different ways huh hopefully i had a few more tricks up my sleeve that'll be some use to you now if you've learned anything yet so far this video give it a thumbs up all right send youtube a signal to say hey more people need to see this information because it's going to change my life all right let's go back down to the other end of the deck we're going to talk about handrails now and the simple system for installing something really classic looking and all the different options for finishing them that most code books around north america will approve and then some options that they won't improve but that you can modify after you get your deck inspection finished all right let's go take a look at that now okay so we're back to the handrail now the last time we were talking about handrails i was just putting this temporary cap on believe it or not that was two days ago now it worked nothing twisted i'm telling you this secret is worth money in the bank be careful when you're taking screws out of wood they get hot oh yeah you feel it [Music] okay gauzers perfect nice and flat no twist that makes the handrail installation go a lot smoother let me tell you now remember i told you if you do that it'll keep them from twisting and moving 50 and an eighth 15 perfect now the secret to keeping everything level and square is when you cut your top and bottom rail for your handrail section measure from the bottom the actual gap right okay 46 and there's two ways to do that you can bend the tape in and use your experience or you can measure this actual distance 43 and a quarter and a hair 43 and 5 16 and then my tape is three and a quarter inches long i'm going to add that together to get your dimension i'm going to go with 46 and just under 5h nice to have a scrap piece of lumber around you can write everything down when i'm making notes because i'm not using metric which would be a lot easier to be honest in this scenario i'm just going to admit it okay metric is superior when you're doing these kind of details i'm using 46 and 5 8 shy or i go l for a large that's an extra 16. one way or the other that's how i work you can use that system if you like or you can go and buy yourself a metric measuring tape for this kind of scenario it'll make a lot easier on you you got to know exactly what you're going to do here for your install let me just bust this open this is the veranda rail kit you've all seen these at home depot i'm pretty sure lowe's has a supplier pretty much the same thing only different i'll bust in the box there's a component in here that you need to have before you start measuring your railing aha you see on the picture it has these clips okay now in the picture on the box they're not using the clips oddly enough but for homeowners especially these clips are going to make your life a lot easier because it means that you don't have to you screw your things together on an angle okay here you go that's a good point max just reminded me when we were doing this project at his house um some of the boxes with the clips were missing because they sell them separately and if if somebody returns the product and they don't put those little white boxes back in people at home depot aren't opening the boxes to check so you should because these do not come sealed at the ends make sure that all of there's a white box in each end before you take it out of the store okay now you'll notice there's a difference all right there's a solid piece and then there's this one here and to be honest with you i'm not sure why they've got different hardware outside of the fact that i like to use these on the top and use these ones on the bottom these will actually fit right in the hole two by four all right and you screw them on and then you can then come bring your thing in position screwed in but there's a thickness to it and you got to take that thickness off your total handrail and then that there's this one here gives you a little bit of mercy okay so let's just measure the plate on this yeah it's gonna be a quarter inch yeah so we got to take our total measurement minus a half an inch okay minus a half which is 4 8 which leaves me 46 and an eighth now i got my measurement we're gonna go and cut our top and bottom rails okay so the last time i put together a handrail system like this we had a ton of comments oh and i'll be honest with you we have supply chain issues right now especially so we found in the store um not even where they were selling the spindles but around the corner there's some steps and lattice and that sort of thing and it was standing up you'll see a bunch of two by fours and they come pre-drilled okay for the veranda size hole okay now this is pressure treated and honestly i'm not putting pressure treated on my cedar deck so i'm going to show you a quick trick so that you can make your own for that we need a table saw so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take the table saw and cut the top of this board off so i have a template and then i'm just going to use a couple of clamps and then drill the rest of my holes in my cedar later sounds simple enough [Music] doesn't [Music] there we go now we got a template so now we need two pieces of rail top and bottom both the same size in this case it's 46 and an eighth all right we're going to draw that and then i'm going to also draw the center line on my cedar which would be 23 in here okay put a little cross there then we're gonna use this template to find out where my spindles end up because there's two ways to do this you can start with a spindle in dead center or you can go the middle between the spindles goes in the center and that all depends on how it ends up near the post so let's take a look at the options here shall we so in this case if i start in the center i'm just going to mark where my spindles would be okay oh look at this i would end up with a spindle right next to it on each end and that will look stupid instead of the center with the hole i'm going to go center of the board these are every three and three quarter center is four and a half so go two and a quarter okay so here's my center line moving forward all right so i'm going to line these two up you'll see my spindle is a couple inches away from the edge now with this lined up yeah that's a nice hole that'll look a lot better what i'm gonna do is take my drill and a forstner bit now a forstner bit is a flat bottom bit okay yes it leaves a little bit of a dimple but other than that it bores a flat hole for argument's sake i think i need some painters tape it's not painting today but that's what i need painters tape when i'm not painting the holes that are coming from the factory are three quarter inch and we can go a little bit more to be honest with you but here's the problem we're gonna run into if you have to make your own holes that's the three quarter the diameter of the pipe itself now this is a powder coated aluminum so you're fine but they put these little gaskets on here these little caps they fit in the original hole all right pretty loosely but they fit and the idea here is to keep water out of the wood to be honest with you i don't care a little bit of water in the wood is all it's going to do is it's going to swell up a little bit hold the spindle even better and it eventually will dry and cedar is not going to rot so i don't need it because whatever diameter that is they don't make a forstner bit that size that's proprietary to the company so that you have to buy their rails see how loosely goosey that is but it's exactly the size of this bit so i'm just going to drill all my holes center get them all marked first you know and if you want to yeah you could probably go out and get some clamps but honestly there's enough inconsistencies in wood already i don't think it's necessary to go through all that trouble okay one two three four five one two three four five that's it all right so we'll save the template for the next piece now we need some painters tape i'm gonna set that there and i'm going to measure off to one inch and i'm going to put my tape on my tape is extremely large now my tape is dirty and one and a bit good that's my depth setter so let's start drilling holes shall we done you want to try not to drill too deep because then when you put all your spindles in they might fall out so we want to keep it consistent now i'm going to go cut this at my mark grab my template i still have my center mark on it line it up with the existing center mark and then slide it over to the middle of the rail and then same thing now do yourself a favor when you come to the railings uh i can't do this today because well they're out of inventory on these rails gotta love supply chain issues but it's always best to do one system at a time because you have a drill set up for every different kind of screw or drill bit or whatever now if you can buy them pre-drilled in your area then do it it's really not that much more expensive than the regular cost of a 2x4 and that took me 15 minutes just to do top and bottom for one set one two three four five six seven eight i got over two hours of drilling holes it's gonna drive me crazy but you know if you need a solution it is an option i wanted to show you this as well if you have a pre-drilled rail right what i like to do is and use pencil for this this is easy because pencil not only washes off you can also sand it off it drives your nuts um i'm going to go just mark my center on the board here okay so it's 23 and a quarter in a bit there's my center on my decks okay i got my center of my my rail let's call it okay now i can line these two up and take a look at my positioning right if i like it then i can use the center line to measure left and right and cut my my rails if i don't i can put the hole to the middle you'll see look what happens here in this particular case but those are the only two options you need to worry about put the hole on the center mark or put the center of the holes on the center mark one of those two options will give you the ideal scenario for each section of railing treat them all individually don't try to do spacing where you imagine where the next post would be and then that's crazy don't just stop take each section individually mark your center figure out you use the center of the board between the holes or a hole as the center mark that's the only choice you have to make and that will give you perfect rails and you're not going to have them all installed like this okay make sure you do the top and bottom for each section line them up put them in the hole make sure they look perfect all right and then what you can do is you can mark the top left all right bottom left because if you got your center off just a little bit and one of these is flipped around and your holes don't line up perfect okay all of your spindles will be on an angle all right and the only reason that would be is because you didn't mark it mark it and then they'll all go up nice and straight that's about all you really got to learn except now we gotta stick these bad boys together gotta get rid of all these caps perfect three quarter drill bit three quarter hole awesome max it's a miracle these are robertson screws not phillips oh god bless you they changed they used to be phillips maybe all my complaining is helping out i'm changing the world one screw at a time [Laughter] all right here we go now ha the top rail we want to use this one and here's why all right when we install this we want this completely out of the way so that we can put a finished piece of wood across all right you don't want to use this up there because then you can't install a drink rail uh what's the point of a deck if you're not gonna be able to lean on and put your drink down what's the point of a deck all right so this is the top because i marked it i'm not gonna get confused i'm gonna put a couple of screws in here and put this plate on love the robertson screws this is awesome now i know some of you might be thinking wow that's a lot of screws okay yeah that's a lot of screws but we are dealing with a structural element here if you're putting up a rail it's to keep um just keep guys like me who've had one or two too many got a little bit of weight on the front fallen off the deck can't just throw a couple of cheap deck screws in there in that situation right you got to use the right hardware what you want to do when you're building something like this that has safety involved think of the most careless dumbest drunk person you know and build it for them and then it'll be safe for everybody else all right that one's ready to roll right let's go see what kind of height we're dealing with here max so this is the part of the project where you're going to be glad that i told you to make the post nice and tall right we want 45 inches above the deck here's why handrails installed in this measure generally are okay they're acceptable and you can pass your deck you screw this bracket in and you're good but if you want a really nice deck you want to cover that piece of wood with this make a tee and that makes the handrail even stronger because now the strength of this wood which is screwed down from here keeps it from bending okay and that makes it a lot stronger and we just slide this up until it's flush with the top all right bam and that's where we want to install it okay because the finish of our deck is going to be another one of the five quarter boards that we used on the floor and it is a little wider than the 2x4 okay and it is wide enough that it's quite comfortable to put any kind of drink on there even a great big fish bowl margarita now you can over overhang all of your deck posts like this all right that's an option look at this right i think you're gonna have that beautiful overhang you can screw all that together that is a nice looking deck right how am i gonna get this perfect and then i'll say it's sexy that's sexy great finish next option you put this here but on the inside okay now in this scenario you have another option and this is nice it's easy to clean the snow you can shovel it off from underneath but another option that's just as pretty that you might prefer set that down inch and a half off to the bottom again you can remove this when you're done installing okay and put that in there now okay now listen i've got a demonstration here from a company called atlanta post caps they sent us all this stuff just to share with you guys one of the reasons why you need a post cap is because the end of the wood grain is exposed okay to the uv to the water no matter what kind of sealant you put on an exposed cap it's going to end up splitting and twisting and rotting it's a disaster so you always got to put a cap on it now these guys develop a cap it's plastic it sits over top you screw it in place all right and then it's got a snap down lid brilliant right it's not going anywhere high winds it's uv protectant it's designed for automotive marine use so they've got a 10 year warranty for you now we've worked out a deal on the on the phone just for you guys you got to check the video description find out what the deal is and how to get in touch with them we'll put links down there or if you go on our website we have an affiliate page shop with us it doesn't mean anything it's just a place where we put all these deals so that you can identify all the deals that we have available for you guys okay listen check it out if you don't know how to check the description underneath the video there'll be a little sentence or two and it'll say show more if you click that it'll expand and you'll get the entire video description all the details other options how to shop on amazon and help our channel out all that information is down there okay so if you're new to youtube you're not familiar that's great information for you now they come in all the different sizes right for four by fours six by sixes all the different colors this gray is really cool because these spindles actually come in a gray powder coated option as well so you go to you can get the gray and the 4x4 or if you're using 6x6 posts you update there they got eights they got 12s these are awesome if you're using those um a column and you've got your faux stone and you want to put a cap on it that's the same as all the other wood details they got it all right one stop shopping it's online shipped anywhere in north america there we go so recap 45 inches above the finished deck or 46 inches when you're installing it in the framing gives you room for your spindles snow shoveling underneath caps okay or if you want you can lift this up a little bit more holy crap there we go okay and you can finish this way too now this is a great way to finish because it covers that cedar that i was talking about the end grain and it'll protect it from the weather the only other thing you really want to think about is for outdoor lighting right you might want to do post caps with the solar lights in them you might also want to get little lights that you can mount on the side just to throw some light in the walking area all these features are available they even have led light fixtures you design you drill a hole in your wood and you can plug them right in and attach it all to a harness underneath the deck limits there are none outdoor living is getting really complicated with a ton of options so really want to think through your design before you start building now think about this if you remember we did a video about um a live show about all the mistakes that homeowners make when they're renovating one of the most common mistakes that you make is you don't know the end from the beginning right you don't know how you're going to finish am i going to go with post caps am i going to use this system am i using solar am i using led do i need to run wiring do i have space to crawl around with the harness or do i need to install it as i go consider all these options know your plan before you start these posts were cut to a certain height for this drink ledge option for adults so that i can rest on this with the drink on the on the edge and enjoy my backyard all right still works if i want a post cap okay drink ledge is just a little bit lower nothing wrong with that all right so for you at home if you're building your own deck 46 inches out of the frame does both options but you're going to want to know what you want okay before you get started please please please plan ahead all right enough of that now we're going to finish installing this handrail so a couple more details you're going to want to have in your pocket so that you don't run into trouble now one more thing the box of spindles that come all right you have two options one is for rails one is for handrails on the stairs they actually come a little shorter and they've got some adjustable fittings on them okay that's brilliant they are designed for six foot length of rail which in most building code areas is as long as a handrail can be without another structural support so keep that in mind don't go getting creative thinking now i can drill holes i'm going to make a 12 foot rail that's just dangerous okay put in a post at least every six feet and then you and your loved ones will be safe and then you'll know exactly how many of these packages to buy as well now that's funny after all of that i never mentioned which one i'm setting myself up for uh i'm not going all the way across the top in this case i have a little bit of a lack of outdoor lighting so i'm going to be setting my rail so that i can install some solar lights and they need about an inch that they can sit over top of this like in that now it's time to throw the level on here okay all right okay now here we go kids you want this right in the middle [Music] before you drive the screw all the way in you want to get the screw on the other side as well [Music] now these screws go in an angle and they have a really good shear strength and they are strong enough to do all of the work to keep this railing in place for whoever ends up trying to run through it so when you're putting the rest of your capping on you can worry about aesthetics and not about structure you don't have to drive screws on the angle and try to tie it all together the other pieces of weather go on top you screw down the top into this and we'll screw from the underside to pull the cap together and that's it so the top of this has got no screws in it and that'll help to promote a long life just like the same concept of when we're putting in the camo in the floor we don't want screws on the surface up here either [Music] now it's time to do the stairs now listen we have a video from a few years back showing you how to cut your own stringers and all that math and all that jazz the easiest way to do stairs is to build it in the same height dimension options as stairs come in right so 8 inch increments so if you build your deck 8 or 16 or 24 inches off the ground or so-so stairs become really easy now if you go to your local hardware store in my case i went to the home depot and they have a couple options they've got these things in metal and they come in different step options okay they don't have a single but they do have a double for going up 16 inches or 24 inches or so and so right up to five or six i think and if you want to go with this option it's a nice clean simple way to do it you simply mount this to the deck and you screw in an angle underneath to grab all your boards and what we're doing is just two by sixes nice and easy it takes a lot of the math out of it but like i said that's only if you thought ahead and you built your deck the right height because you are trying to get every step to be the same rise it's kind of a code thing these come with an eight inch finish rise now keep on saying that i should measure it it's probably seven and a quarter that's seven and a half same thing only different right okay so then this one at the bottom is going to be six because the wood you're going to put on here is one and a half inches thick always go with the two by material which is actual dimension of one and a half and then every step will be the same okay the other option you have well i should just say one of the benefits of this is because it's manufactured and welded every single one of these is exactly straight dead-on perfect as the next one okay the other option they have there is the wood ones same thing the bottom step is shorter than all the rest to give you that continuity but you know what this is for kind of close applications now i'll just go like this and i'll show you what i mean let's get the back the same height now you can see what i'm talking about with the kind of close we have different dimensions there's highs and lows fronts and rears it's a little bit screwed up actually if i wanted to fix this to make perfect stairs this is perfect this is high this is perfect but it's not far enough i'd have to be modifying every one of these steps all day long to get it perfect it's really irritating now where this can be beneficial is if you're adding stairs and you're on a hill okay because you're going to have a high and a low part and that way you can actually modify the steps because they're made of wood that's the only time i use these is when i'm on a hill other than that stick with something simple like this because it's a lot quicker and it gets rid of all the wobble nine inches it's gonna be seven and a half that's perfect oh my god i'm good all right okay whoo now every one of these rises is seven and a half plus the material so what i've got here is i've built this deck at the height where i've finished at nine inches okay i mean really close to it because after i put this material on my last ride is gonna be seven and a half that is optimal always think the end from the beginning and so you can make things like this work for you too okay now what we have is a design thing going on we showed you how to build the skirt one of the benefits of this is this skirt panel is installed center on my post okay so i'm gonna put one of these stringers at this side one in the middle and one at the other side and what i'm going to use to as a fastener and here's a great sheet for you these structural screws okay these ones here they're the number 10s okay and on the back they make the claim and i know it's kind of hard to believe but this screw has the same shear strength same load capacity rating as a half inch metal lag bolt right this tiny little screw so for everybody who's out there don't be screaming in the comments all the shear strength on screws suck because this is not the same deal this is a structural screw it's been tested and proven your inspector on building is going to be able to look at that screw guess what structural screws all have in common they have a number printed on the head your inspector can look at that number and know if your screw is rated for the job that's one of the benefits also comes with a bit but i don't really like that bit it's a pain in the butt to work with i bought my own and i can screw these right in place now that would work but i think it'd be ugly so what i'm gonna do is grab my level throw my magnet side down okay and i'm just gonna adjust the height here and i'm gonna do it this way i want the bubble on the front to be making contact with this black line and have a little bit of gap here i'm going to get this perfect for your your one shot ready right there right there right there right there and what that means is it's like one degree if your stairs are one degree towards the structure you're going to find that it's a lot easier for people to climb up because it's helping to make them fall forward a little bit but when you're coming down if your stairs are the other way people especially near the end of the party are more likely to just fall right on their face they start getting momentum leaning forward and that's not a good time for that so always have your stairs just a little bit of a hair towards the structure and you'll avoid that problem so get my height here again make sure it's where i want it it's a really good tip i like that tip okay and what i'm going to do is i'm going to cut it off so that it sits flush up underneath the wood on the inside in that corner okay and that will be really sexy [Music] um [Music] okay we're just throwing this step in for all of you folks at home we're actually going to duplicate this whole installation there is a gap behind this to the board this is exactly the same as the material that we're using around here so i just cut a couple of shims i'm going to stick them up in place and fire a brad nail into it real quick just so it's not gonna fall out on me okay i'm gonna pack that into all three of these locations although i don't know how the heck i'm gonna reach back there oh this is this is a job for my son oh man okay go thank you very much now you can see how this is coming together each of these screws i'm putting in are rated for a thousand pounds right because half inch lag bolt ready for a thousand pound so we're gonna screw near the top of it the hole so that it's not slipping around on us we're gonna get all three of these installed [Music] oh yeah and don't be too hard on yourself when you're doing this work as long as your bubble is inside the two lines on your level you're gonna be so close to perfect we'll just have to call it good enough sometimes cause i'll tell you you go ahead if you want to be hard on yourself but before you do that go around everywhere in the world where you find a set of stairs and throw a level everywhere and then when you see that nothing is level you won't be quite so hard on yourself because nothing in this world is level especially the stairs we use it as a guide not as a rule and not a way to inflict discipline on yourself okay here we go sometimes the idea of close enough just got to be close enough check this here right especially when we're finishing on an outdoor patio i've got a bit of a movement here i got about a sixteenth of an inch on each side now there's two ways to fix this when i can take a grinder and cut the back side over here or i can just go inside and grab a couple of those felt pads and put them underneath the corners that's what i'm gonna do so now i've got my cedar two by sixes and the reason i went with cedar two by sixes is really simple any one and a half inch rise and i need to have an average step i'm gonna show you this to you check this out so if i put two of these bad boys on i end up with an average step that is exactly 11 inch because two of them together is 11 inches just a little shy okay so we scroll this together it gives me a nice little bit of an overhang which is a nosing which is lovely and because we're making actually four foot steps i think we're making fours right wow like we're really making four foot steps yeah since we're making four foot steps i just cut all of these in exactly in half and eggs have perfect number wood i'm just going to run into the saw and i'll be right back all right so now important to remember that when you're working with cedar or pressure treated wood you need to have screws that are labeled for acq compliant and the label will say acq check mark okay something like this that's important if you're not using the right screw then you're screwed so let's just put this in here on an angle i'm using a one and a half inch screw and because it's going at an angle it actually um is impossible for it to stick through the top okay so that's the good part it also gives you really nice compression when your screw is going on an angle okay the head is a lot wider so when you get to that point where you've got compression like this from the underside that's where you want to stop don't drive it through until you go through the hole at the end of the day if you're coming through like this on an angle from each side into the wood okay the board has no ability to go left or right and that's what you're looking for something to keep it stable gravity does a lot of the work we're just trying to make sure things aren't moving around on us now before i put the second screw in i want to make sure that my angle here is still good i want to have the same kind of overhang at the top and the bottom yep okay so now we have to do is just line all this up it's relatively a piece of cake [Music] okay change angle on the other side the way you remember this is when you're screwing always screw from the outside towards the inside [Music] right nothing's moving around perfect now one more thing to mention because we've got this warped as soon as i if i have a board that's got a warp you don't want to fight with the warp this board has a warp okay i don't want to lay it like this okay i want to just work with it i'm not looking for a battle here okay the more you have to let make the screws do all the work to tighten everything up and force everything into place the harder it's going to get [Music] one more thing to add here might even be a good piece of advice remember you're going to want to have one of these stringers for every 24 inches if you're using two by lumber as your surface you're fine with it if you want to modify this anyway and you want to go with a one inch wood then go every 16. remember stair treads and stringers should have the same role as floor joists yep it's picking up max better get this done before the typhoon comes like holy crap eh little secret to help keep everything nice and flush because when you're approaching a set of stairs if you look at them and they're all wonky left and right it looks like crap right well take a piece of wood and just line them all up before you get started okay here we go now if you put a level on this board to check to see if this board is plumb then all of these stairs will be straight and in line and that'll get it close enough you're not gonna see it from my house so right about now a bunch of you're asking yourself how's he gonna screw that down when he's so close to the ground that's easy now that i got the first two steps on everything is square and it's not it's stable it's not moving i can disengage from the top and flip it over all right piece of cake now once we get this last string this this first board of the of the this step done same thing we're just cheating we're just going to use this as our end stop put that on the bit hold that nice and tight throwing a screw here [Music] okay nice bit of windy today huh makes you feel alive doesn't it now that we got that done let's put this back in place [Music] there it is there we go now the only thing left to do is get my palm sander out clean up my edges a little bit now if you want to add a hand rail to scenario like this you're perfectly capable of doing it the biggest trick here is that when you put a post down now you've got to actually consider putting wood across the front as well on the inside so you have something to anchor to okay so if you want to put a post here you can't just attach to here all right so what i would suggest if you want to add a post in behind this part right here okay there's another hole put a two by six across the back side in there screw it from the bottom and then you can have some some meat a little bit more meat than just this corner you have a couple points to attach okay that's a really good idea and then you know what there are no end to creative options okay the secrets to successful decks are always the same thing and from the beginning have a plan sort out your materials before you get started and make sure you pay attention to details if you don't like something fix it before you move forward sometimes when we're making these videos we rush a little bit because we're trying to get the video done and we don't take the amount of care that would probably take otherwise but that's okay i'm working on my house in max's house and we're pretty easy on each other [Music] [Music] [Music] do well hopefully you learned something today and it was helpful because that's our goal here on home renovation diy just to help you guys be better at what you do when it comes to renovating your home remember outdoor projects have great return on investment so if you do it yourself you make a ton of money all right give us the video a thumbs up if you appreciate the information don't forget to subscribe to the channel you can see all the rest of the outdoor project that we're doing here because on this channel we're covering the 1880 farmhouse rebuild click the link right over here and we got a playlist set up for you you can join us from the beginning of this adventure a thousand square feet outdoor living space it's gonna be awesome

Channel: Home RenoVision DIY

Views: 663,425

Rating: 4.9010439 out of 5

Keywords: homerenovision, renovision, jeff thorman, homerenovisiondiy, how to rebuild a porch deck, deck, do it yourself, how to, diy deck, how to build a deck, home improvement, build a deck, deck building, deck diy, repair, home repair, deck repair, porch, decking, rebuilding a deck, building a deck, build deck, save your deck, decks, jeff thorman deck, home renovision deck, rebuilding deck stairs, deck rebuild ideas, diy deck rebuild, how to build any deck from a to z, rebuild a deck

Id: hFmPEx6-uMA

Length: 134min 35sec (8075 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 09 2021