Here Is Where Everybody Fails When Building a Deck! They Don't Know How to Finish It!

nothing about this is structural this is not acceptable I knew that was coming this is actually kind of amazing this was built wrong it was holding moisture it wasn't being able to dry and it still isn't watered at the top of this book if this book's level to you I'm gonna suggest you go to seek some medical attention this extremely brutal the guy who built this deck didn't even take the time to lift off the welcome mat unbelievable there's a lot of structural issues here we're gonna have to make a list figure out a plan to restore all that before we can read ech I think we're gonna increase value in this kitchen this is not acceptable money in the bank this is where it gets fun it's not the time they're putting out the big dollars thank you there's another tool you won't need to buy perfect every time [Music] so not all decks are created today is reality renovation episode we're going to reface this deck that was built about 20-something years ago by someone who obviously didn't know anything about what they were doing they tried their best and failed miserably so let's go take a quick look at all of the construction problems that we have here and what we're gonna do to salvage this deck and bring it back to life so we've all heard the expression you know there's nothing new Under the Sun and that holds true for deck construction for a long time the basics have remained the same some of the technologies have changed some of the finishings we've changed some of the products have changed but the basis for how to build a deck is always remain the same you build a box you put in your floor joists very similar to at home construction 16 inch on center you make it strong enough to carry weight you find a way to transfer that load to the ground or attach it to the house and then you finish it well here's where everybody fails they build a box they get their joist package proper but they don't know how to finish now twenty-something years ago if you weren't the son of a carpenter your resources available to help you build your deck we're absolutely atrocious the occasional book the odd TV show that showed you a tip here there nowadays we've got access to information and that's why we're here we're gonna show you all the things that were done wrong and how you can take your dismal failure of a deck that you've inherited from someone in your family and reface it and make it look absolutely beautiful and functional and safe because first of all when you put a railing system and attach it to the surface of your deck and it has no real not really built into the structure it's not safe the idea is this in the engineering world they try to use this concept of a 400-pound man drunk following sideways into a railing is it gonna keep him from falling off the building not in this situation somebody's gonna get killed this is not acceptable so when you surf a screw this is what you get you get a little bit of screw into a five quarter board nothing about this is structural it's just wrong and the fact that these plates are all tight against the floor means there's no air moving here so there's no way to dry the boards out if this was guaranteed to rot out because moisture gets trapped underneath here so keep in mind when you're finishing your deck always have your support columns right into the frame try to get void using those surface mounted situations and give it some rigidity this will help extend the length of your deck now design wise I get what they were doing and it's not a terrible idea you know you've got your spindles you got good spacing so your kid can't crawl out and fall to their death they've got this little 2x4 with a five quarter inch board what I like to call a drink ledge so in theory it's good you know you can rest here you can put your drinks out it's a little low but this was a standard back in the day it's a 36-inch nowadays we go over the 42 that way you can lean on it without having to bend over that's great but the problem here with this particular situation again is it's all surface and at the end of the day if you're screwing down your top plate from the top again you're encouraging all the kinds of rot okay when you're attaching a top plate always do it from the bottom use the right length screw so it doesn't come out through the top and you'll get a much nicer look and that's some that you can actually give a lights and finish to it'll be perfect so everything about this deck is screaming one thing it says hey I went and picked up the lumber myself and I'll use my little hatchback convertible car and I had everything cut down or bought everything in eight-foot pieces so you can see where this deck isn't even 16 feet long and we've always had lumber long enough to do this in one piece but they've gone ahead and stitched and seemed in and this is classic situation here okay this is two boards meeting I got all the screws exposed I got organic material in here that's just sitting there rotting away and these boards are just slowly receding this is erosion and it's rot and it means that you have a ticking time-bomb if you're gonna build something and spend all that time and energy and money to build it you should build it so that it lasts I'm telling you right now if this was built a little bit differently with full pieces of lumber we wouldn't be sitting here today resurfacing but because there was a little bit of missing knowledge and the cut a corner and they didn't pay 50 bucks to get the material delivered now you're in a situation where you have to do it all over again but not all of it just the top now I'm really hoping that when we pull this back we're gonna find a substructure that's usable or at least repairable so that we can resurface this deck and not have to start from scratch and that's the hope so this deck is awesome because it's a classic example of someone who's doing it for the first time they didn't have the experience to realize they started laying their deck boards right here flush with their joist with the rim joist okay went back towards the house made their cuts at the house which is fine now in theory you want your deck it should be like a step you want to have that nosing and then they added a skirt board and then they realized that the skirt board was protruding past the deck that looked ridiculous let me get this pile of junk out of the way and so the answer that problem is going by some interior molding this is this is pine this isn't even supposed to be used outside and they capped this just to make it look pretty threw a few nails in it and called it done Oh now I don't want to be too hard on the homeowner because obviously they cared enough to try to make it look pretty but the reality is if you don't know the end from the beginning when you're building something you're gonna run into these kinds of problems so stick with this and we'll explain how to tear this apart and how to rebuild it we're gonna make this beautiful and we're gonna give it another whole 20 30 year lifespan it's only gonna take one day so if you're like most people you're living in a house that's got a pre-existing deck that was built with great intentions but not with the greatest of skill level so we're dealing with the deck today that says dead as the plant that was sitting on it not nice to look at the sad thing is is the substructure of this deck I can tell just by looking at it still nice and solid but everything on top is completely rotten it hasn't been managed properly it hasn't been dealt with for the weather and it wasn't built right so that it could dry and it's just been rotting where it sits for the last 15 years such a shame so we're gonna get this all taken care of and removed so that we can rebuild it and have a beautiful place to hang out again so we found out really quickly here when we push the railing over that they were using the wrong size screws to build everything so let's find out if they put the floor down with the right screws nope this wood is inch-and-a-quarter which means this screw should be at least a two and a half inch all right you want it to be one and a half times longer than the material you're attaching and that's just not cutting it so these are short no that's just spinning and that's disappointing well occasionally our gonna grab yeah we'll try to pull as many as we can I think we're gonna be using the crowbar to lift it up that means that the top of all these joists are gonna be compromised so we put our new decking lumber down we're actually gonna have to go back to the three inch screw so that we're going past the compromised number into solid meat again this wood under here aside from a little bit of organic material that builds up which is somewhat normal it's actually in pretty good shape this is actually kind of amazing to be honest with you when I lifted this up I was expecting to see a lot more rot on the surface of this deck this is a testimony to how good quality of pressure-treated substructure is this was built wrong that was holding moisture it wasn't being able to dry and it still isn't rotted out the top of this wood like that can still hold this screw that's amazing [Music] you gotta study [Music] the greatest enemy you have when you're building a deck close to the ground is what I call the sauna effects because of the Sun heating down and it draws all the moisture out of the dirt and it pulls it into the wood because it really overheats underneath it so if you don't have a lot of airflow underneath your your porch or your deck and you're close to the ground you're gonna rot prematurely if if this looks level to you I'm gonna suggest you go to seek some medical attention and is this extremely brutal this is a mission that's successful we pulled off the most the deck boards here the way we're doing it we're leaving our wood intact and it's in good condition however it's obvious that this is a do-it-yourselfer project there is a lot of structural issues here we're gonna have to make a list figure out a plan to restore all that before we can read ech here we go max the guy who built this deck didn't even take the time to lift off the welcome mat unbelievable so what we have here is an obvious example of what not to do we've got part of this structure attached to the house part of the structure using the the concrete step as structure we have 4x4 posts that look like they're just in the dirt we're gonna dig out some dirt and see maybe they're in concrete so that'll help we have rim joists joist hangers wrong kind of fasteners not hangers on the other side not attached the post properly everything is at a level I don't know if this was original or if it's just a sunken post we have so many little issues here that we have to tackle and of course the goal here was to just reface it and rebuild but I think we might be in for a little bit more work than that time to pull out the pen and paper we got some notes to make so we're gonna talk real quick about structural framing for decks outside and there are two kinds of decks that you can build one is where it actually has structure and footings and is attached to the house which by you actually attaching to the building and all of your posts that are going to the ground are down into a footing that goes below a frost line if you have all in your area or it's in something solid that's not going to be in direct contact with dirt so it doesn't cause rotting and premature dropping of your deck in this situation this DIY homeowner that built this deck did a combination of both and you'll see this all the time people think it's a really good idea to attach to the house and then they just drop some 4x4 posts into the soil they'll pack it down a little bit maybe it's all a disaster so we've got all kinds of movement going on the middle is almost completely sunken right out out of sight and I'll just drop this in here for you have a quick peek there is a one-inch gap over four and a half feet here and this is already the low part of the deck when I go and put my level this way I am looking at like my full whole hand underneath here this is a 5 foot sorry 6 foot level it's an 8 foot deck and you get an idea of how dramatic the drop is in the middle here now the screws are coming loose however they starting to rot absolute mess of course nothing is ever square but what we can do in this situation is we can come up with a strategy for restoring this frame so that we can actually put a deck surface back on top so every step that's taken is pushing this into the dirt so we want to do right away is eliminate it [Music] [Music] they're already a really big improvement just getting rid of that one stupid shim [Music] [Applause] all the way to that deck this whole assembly is on one roof again just totally calm please you know there's a time and a place to save money when you're building something but when you're relying on these fasteners to do all of the structural carrying you really can't afford to go and whoops not buy the right now yep that shouldn't be able to do down like that now what have we got over here hey hey finishing nails love it now someone named screws on the other some of them are galvanized some of them arts somebody's building this out of a jar of pastors whatever they picked up they use is unbelievable so there there are a lot of connections made here so these boards are actually in the way they're not necessary yep when it comes apart that easy if you got a meal it's all soft and weak you can't hammer it through put it in sideways you know roll it over this way you can pull it out the other side my whole hand underneath but when we put our new piece of wood it spans the entire gap and I lift this into the floor joists BAM whole deck we flush there we go so when you're building a deck you don't always have the luxury of the right tool for the right job and as a homeowner if you have a skill saw you've got all you need in order to do your framing plus one of these so what I do is I hold this against my wood I hold the sob plate against the triangle and I can actually run over until my blade is exactly where I want it back it up start it and I run the saw against my triangle that I have pinched in place with my hand [Music] that is a technique for cutting all your dimensional lumber you don't have to use the chop saw so you can actually have the saw with you with your triangle and you can be running around your deck making all your cuts and cutting them on the site boom boom boom boom flip them over and screw them in and I'll save you a lot of running back and forth to a stationary saw like this so 2x6 requires this one screw permit to it [Music] classic example of a homeowner we built the deck I didn't know what he was doing but he was close you know there's a lot of what's done here that was kind of close to right need a few modifications that can all be saved now that is almost perfect except this corner is a little long and our whole fronts a little low so now who's better structure flat we'll call it we have one two three four five points where all the wood is sitting in dirt and that's what we're gonna fix next when the guy doesn't even take his welcome mat off the step yeah when he building the deck he's not forgotten there ain't no way [Applause] [Music] now the idea here select the neck here's our temporary support race our gap yeah that's pretty intense important to note that in our region check your local building code but any structure like this that we build in our region under 24 inches has no building code so there's no rules so you can do your whole popsicle stick deck if you want to but just so that I can sleep at night I like to use some intelligence some structural fasteners a little bit of science but you know legally but this other homeowner done there's nothing wrong with it so it was lousy but it wasn't wrong because it's not illegal strange I'm throwing in some limestone screenings here just so that I can level this off [Music] that's structurally sound throw this on our new piece of wood that goes right through one side to the other that looks good yeah but this time I'm gonna lift it to my line and then about an eighth of an inch above that way once I'm done putting all my aggregate down here I'll be able to tamp it into place [Music] Oh which says [Music] down in my line forever so with this I'm just basically doing a splint knowing that I put enough screws in this block and that is basically six I have 500 pounds of shear strength in this one corner so I would have to fit six adults between that wall in this corner and between here and here jumping up and down with all their strength simultaneously before we are having a risk from any home structural failure pretty sure that we're not gonna end up with that kind of a scenario [Music] it's just really great for leveling phasic yeah by order of the beat deep behind us [Music] so my favorite technique for installing a joist hanger when you're doing a joist hanger every one of these little holes gets a screw this is engineered to hold the bracket to the rim or your joist this is engineered to hold this piece of material from separating from the bracket so doesn't fall out of the seat and this is not a coated screw it's acq compliant but it's not a coda screw this is an alloy it's forged it'll never rust period not like galvanized nails not like hcq screws that will never rust and if you aren't using a forged alloy on your Simpson strong type with that fail inspection and sooner or later one of these days they'll just fall apart the copper and pressure-treated in the pressure free lumber is what costs the oxidation that kills your screw so the coating that protects for so long that's why when your deal with structure we deal with point load we deal with brackets we deal with forage screws those elements will never rust and will never fail I mean all the boards can lift off and rot off and that's fine you're not going to fall through your deck there you go so we have basically reconstructed our deck we've got all our point loads taken care of we have our new joists packaged in we have joist hangers everywhere we've put some new head lock screws right through the plate into the wall just to strengthen things up because it looked a little soft over here on the side we've got a 2x4 that's carrying our load this is really not right but what we're gonna do is we're gonna transfer all our load points on this front of the deck right from the framing to the ports by using cedar shimmy techniques so the reality is our joists package that's carrying weight here it's only three and a half so it's not a big concern that we're using a little smaller number there that's what's there and rebuilding that means tearing everything apart and nobody's in the mood for that this decks already been here for 20 years and nobody's had an accident it's just kind of funny because here we've got this lovely 2 by 6 area that looks like they use scraps to do the job you've got two of them cut down here and a little scrap in the middle this is not gonna cut it folks when you're stabbing something like this in a wall using a 1 foot piece is probably fine when you're doing it on the floor really want to laminate the majority of the board it's not the whole thing and then here's the key every six inches you want to go from high to low high like Big W is all the way across the board that's going to give you that strength of a triangle would can't bend if it's attached in that manner [Music] [Applause] that's not going anywhere anymore so now it's not just flat oh I'm loving it you know when you get down here call it some person like this you almost see every last choice at the very last second come together in touch that is absolutely sexy I don't think we could have done that good a job with bran or lumber the other thing we're going to use here is head lock screws I love this technology these things are awesome because they replace the strength of a 3h galvanized lag bolt and they allow me to put structural strength and every piece of lumber that I'm tying together I'm not relying on nails or screws so that I've got enough shear strength where I'm being creative with my repairs and I can carry all the weight of a whole family being out here without any risk for their safety this is a little overkill right reality is three of these screws will hold the whole deck these replace the strength of a 3/8 galvanized bolt which means I don't have to drill knocking a bolt throwing a washer in a nut and then wrench it all together I can just drag the zoom of my impact driver and I'm structurally sound forever the last step you really want to take care of and this is really simple is you're gonna have your outside Ridge plate and you want to create a nice level surface off the front top and bottom so there's two advantages to having this piece of wood down here one you have a skirt board that you can attach it'll be flush to when we put in our post for our our railing system we don't have to go surface mount we don't have to just rely on the first 4 or 5 inches of wood here to screw to we can actually cut our post to go all the way down into here so I can attach it down here in the middle and with the top rail that creates three points of contact which makes the entire deck so strong no one will ever ever ever ever be able to fall through the railing I think I did when we started the job [Music] [Music] when you're building your frame just before you start decking make sure you get through a structural post in place and by structural element like railing structure the idea here is we want to know exactly what we're gonna do for how we're cutting our lumber eight-foot posts this one's a little bit more than eight feet long what I do is I just kind of grab a few miles from my order I like to visualize the space this is basically the height of that railing plus an inch because you want to keep a gap down there so that things stay nice and dry then there's another two by four and then a five quarter board that leaves us with almost three inches of stub which is perfect for the LED cap usually those lights when they sit about an inch over the top and that'll just give everything a nice clean and tensional look and then the shorter post will just be brought over here somewhere in the middle when we get into that kind of math that's part of the railing design so we'll talk about that a little bit later but what we want to do is just make a mental note this is gonna be the height our middle post is going to be coming out of this deck right to this point [Music] what I'm doing here is I'm not relying on the screws through the rim plate to hold the post you will find these things love to twist overtime don't forget when cedar grows cedar grows like this okay so when you cut it he wants to untangle itself that's why they always twist so when you're putting in a post even if it's overnight you've got to have a top rail attached temporarily screw it all in and make sure that it's not gonna list on you because you'll come out in the morning and it'll be like a candy cane deck and what this does this gives me a lot of more support because now when there's pressure or force on the on the railing up here going outwards it's it's levered here and then the bottom inside the deck wants to go that way so by putting this block here and I restrict the ability of the bottom of that post to swing into the deck it extra makes the top of the deck all that much stronger so now when I'm pulling on this I'm not just pulling on the top of this I'm also creating a force on the bottom of this post going inwards but with that blocking there I don't have to rely on the thread on these screws to hold it in place I also have the sheer strength of the screws going into the two by six here at three different points help hold it all together if you don't set your rails and you're blocking before you put your decking on the only option you have left is to notch them and hang them off the side they split easy you could use those fancy little post cap thing and screw together and screw it down and that's all fine and good in some scenarios but this is actually gonna be a railing and there's actually gonna be people coming and going and safety is a concern here because there's gonna be two stairs so we want to make sure that all this is as rigid as humanly possible and that is all part of structure so we're just gonna get this finished up and it'll be time to start laying the deck boards project update we didn't get as much done today as I'd hoped yeah but sometimes when you're organized for your delivery for the same day that you start a project the delivery comes a lot later than you hoped for that's such his life the good news as I was hanging out with my buddy max Oh didn't hurt at all we have our structure completed we're level we have our posts figured out we know our design elements now all we have left to do now really is put all of our decking down and finish off with all of our design trims and add some stairs so that'll be tomorrow no problem to finish all that off in one day and you know maybe maybe we can finish early tomorrow happy nice [Music] it is morning of day two yeah you heard me say it day two here's what happened we ordered our material for delivery yesterday morning and for whatever reason the gods at the delivery gave us late in the afternoon so we could only get so much done yesterday besides we did a lot of work on the deck structure yeah maybe he's a little aggressive thinking we can knock that off in one day but this is the reality right I mean in the real world you open something up you think you're gonna throw an extra few screws or a couple of joist hangers and then get right back to work you're skinning but we spent most of our day just getting it ready to deck right so this is what's going on this stuff you see behind me is just us taking care of our posts we put them in last night we're getting a little moisture in the evening still where we are and we didn't want to get the wood wet and have it start to twist again cedar we're using here and cedar when it grows it grows like this so when you cut it and it gets wet it wants to go like this makes a hell of a mess so you put in the a board on top a couple of screws to keep things from spinning around overnight just a little tip in case you get stuck like we did having to come back the next day when it comes to your cedar and we chose cedar on this job instead of pressure-treated you could to keep your costs down but in this particular case client wanted to spend a few extra bucks so we could smell pretty what we're gonna get here is a it's a local building store cedar now I don't know what it's like where you're from but in our region there are only so many places that you can get cedar from and only one of them really has great relationship with the mills at West okay so when we order our cedar we got it all delivered from one building store and because it was convenient and they could deliver on our schedule which is kind of last-minute on this project we don't get the best cedar in town just to be honest this is a decent quality cedar but what we're getting is a lot of stuff that's got a lot of movement so there's gonna be a bit of fighting to get all these boards in place if you have an opportunity do a little research in your neighborhood find out who gets the best quality cedar and then go and take a look at the product grab a few boards make sure they're all nice and straight 16 foot boards nice and straight is rare so only the guys I have the best relationships get them in stock that's something to keep in mind when you're going shopping not all trees are made the same okay so when it comes out of the mill there's a different quality levels and if you're one of those picky type people who really wants to make sure everything's perfect and you don't want to fight with your lumber to install it then you better pay a little bit extra and get the a great quality alright so today we're gonna dig it we're gonna put on the railings the stairs everything it should take us about four hours that's why we assume that we should have been able to finish this yesterday all things being equal who cares it's a beautiful day it's time to get to work my system for installing your five quarter deck boards is as follows one take your load and start laying it out and you'll quickly identify boards that have got a bad warp to them I call it the hockey stick collection and they're all over here okay if I have to force a couple them in which we will just by the number here I can tell I've got probably two or three that I'm gonna have to force in then that's fine but I want to identify the straightest lumber that I have just by putting them down together we also want to take a look at the crown you're gonna see that all the wood has got a grain in it okay so what you want is you take a look at the green it's like a bowl in a lot of cases and that bowl is going to start like this and it'll curl over time so what you want to do is you want to have the crown up which is the top of the rainbow facing up so that it's like this instead okay while that's drying it'll be trying to dry ends down which are already screwed in place so then the board stays flat if you leave it the other way it'll be fighting and drying and trying to lift your screws you run the risk of these things kind of coming loose over time and you get this cupping effect it's not very nice to welcome now this is the advantage of getting boards longer than you're gonna use now there's a lot of people out there have this misconception the cedar only comes in 16 foot lengths that's not true I can get it up to 20 feet we have a couple of locations in town that have relationships with mills and get me 20-foot cedar boards so I can do an 18 19 foot deck and still just install all my splits and cut them off when I'm done and that's worth its weight in gold because at the end of the day the last thing you want to do is build your deck with joints on the joists that's why we're replacing this deck the one that was here was cedar and it they did that they had short lumber and that caused early rot it was a disaster so we're gonna avoid that at all costs that's got a bad split and it's already cupping so it's upside down and it's backwards here's an example of a decision that you got to make for yourself I'm bleeding imagine that this board right in this position is crowned is crown up the way we want it that's the most ideal situation unfortunately it also comes with some bad damage on the edge here in two spots probably from some young kid at the store where the forklift doesn't know what the hell he's doing not a big deal okay yeah it's crowned the wrong way but I would rather have it crown the wrong way than have a nasty ugly spot showing and because we ordered this on a delivery I don't have a whole lot of choice I got to use this board so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take my giant triangle here now watch this because these corners are all rounded alright and the system here with a rounded deck is really quite dangerous if you flip it around this way you'll make contact with the solid side and you'll actually make the mark on the right place okay so there we go I always come backwards and slide up to your post and when you're cutting cut the pencil to disappear and you know you're making the right move it's probably the most important measurement on the entire build once you get this one done everything else should just go nice and smooth because we've organized our wood to be straight and we have our finish all figured out so this one board the first one you set on behind your post once you've got that that's like your template all you got to do is make sure everything is gapped consistently after that you're home free [Music] jigsaws don't have a break on them make sure the blade stops moving before you set it down and always set it down sideways that's a lesson you learn the hard way so what I'm doing now is I'm setting this board in place it's not moving around and using this screw just to mark the middle of my stud for my choice sorry so then after I get on my deck boards in place it's a lot easier for me to know exactly where I'm going I don't have it all buried on me there you go you want the head just a little bit below the surface don't leave it out it'll look like junk what happens is that wood will end up swelling up over time and slowly close that hole over it'll be perfect here's a note for you there's two kind of colors of screws in the market where we are is green and brown and generally speaking pressure-treated lumber came and green up until recently now they have a brown pressure-treated lumber they still have a green pressure-treated lumber and here's what I'm gonna suggest I don't care what color your wood is you buy the brown screw alright if you buy green lumber use the brown screw it's gonna look stupid for the first year but for the next 39 years of the deck life it'll be the same color as that pressure-treated lumber once the Sun has a chance to get at it for a little while if you use the green screw it'll look great for the first year and look stupid for the next 39 years [Music] the people are sticklers about putting the screw in exactly the same spot one inch off the edge has to be one inch off yet if there's a knot in the wood one inch off the edge don't put a screw there okay find somewhere else to put that screw you have to get outside the rings of that knot all right if that knot was right here I'd be putting my first screw over here because I'm not screwing through a knot it's guaranteed to crumble and pop on you here we go you see that pull nice and tight now we're gonna be using the saw later to cut off the edge so it's better to fit all of your edges are screwed down first because that'll save you a whole lot of time and you won't have to screw around with it afterwards and risk splitting your wood so when I started to put in that screw I could feel the resistance of the knot and it was much further than what it was visible there so the knots probably gone an angle through the wood so what I did is I went into reverse and I burned it backwards pushing down through the wood once that cleared the knot then I drove it in so since we're gonna be putting a lot of pressure on the boards we're gonna start screwing at the very ends so what you want to do you start your screw in the wood put it on reverse and push down while going backwards till you get a little bit smoke and you drive it down and it'll never split on you I learned that trick of all things from an electrician if you've ever tried putting screws in the end of a piece of cedar you know what splits 99 times out of 99 the fact that I just did four in a row means that I can make miracles happen this is the point where we can put some pressure on this wood and pull it forward okay [Music] that's one way to straighten the board there is another way now ladies this is something that's awesome you can do this all by yourself because you can sit on top of your deck get it off set up it's a one-person operation and you can just lean with your hand you can throw your shoulder into it okay and you close that gap until you're absolutely in love with it five your screw don't release the pressure until you get all your through all right [Music] [Music] okay so update we have our deck finished we have all the boards down all of our cuts made and as you can see it's a lot bigger looking now than it was when we first started which is amazing amazing how clean and bright always makes something look better we are gonna tackle the rest of this project and hopefully get it done the next hour and a half or so because there is a storm a-brewin we got to get done and out of here before we get blowing away from cannons all right it is railing day I'm so excited because I've got about two hours to finish this job off before I get flooded out from a rainstorm that's coming so let's get to work we're putting in a horizontal rail kit if you've never seen this done before it's really really simple we're gonna go with a top and bottom rail that comes pre-drilled we're going with cedar to match our deck and then of course we're gonna have this top plate that we install it up to and leave a gap at the bottom that way everything stays nice and dry and then we're going to finish all this off with a decorative drink ledge we're gonna put a five quarter by six inch board on top and that way we have a surface on the top that we can screw together from the bottom everything be clean and shiny and we can sand and polish it and have it beautiful you here's to come we're gonna finish this whole system over to the stairs and down they're two steps on to the regular landing and we're gonna do these really gradual because we need to get visitors to the house that's nice to consider the fact that grandma is only five feet tall and she just can't high step it like she used to so instead of going with a nine and a half inch stair we're gonna go with three steps here with a six inch rise and that'll be simple to build we're just gonna use two by six and make a couple of boxes tied together some no one slips and voila we're gonna have ourselves a finished project now this kit is gonna throw you for a loop because it has end caps and these get installed on the end of the rail top and bottom and then you set it in place and then they have these little places here that you can actually use to screw these into the wood so that you're not screwing through the end of the wood you're screwing through a pleats and that'll keep your rail from breaking and rotting out over time [Music] now some of you may have seen my son Nate did a little video on this kind of process not too long ago last year sometime right gonna think he was a lot better at it than I was yes hey he got a real knack for sticking these things in real quick I'm gonna have to go back and watch that video because this is frustrating [Music] there we go rocket so at this point we're just gonna finish putting all of the structural screws in and then we'll tie a couple of screws in from the top into this section getting rid of this gap here so you don't have an air air space here nothing works when you're sitting down and looking past your railing your seat space in between your rails so we'll get that nice and tightened up and then we'll be able to cut our 5 chord on top and screw that from the bottom this is a perfect drink ledge perfect height for standing up there and relaxing and having some time with your friends so I've cut this top plate that we talked about this is a five quarter board this edge is actually sharp it's not very attractive we're gonna do is we're gonna pop down to the chop saw and we're gonna cut some corners off take our palm sander soften out all that up and then we'll coming up and screw this in place we're gonna just take our thumb sander I'm using a 220 grit just because cedar is a softwood lumber and it doesn't take a whole lot of energy and you can just burn right through the whole board sometimes you just got to learn by trial and error [Music] just softening up the edges keep in mind that since we're going to be using our hands on these really want to make sure that no one's gonna have an injury so this handrail is nice but this now that's sick [Music] now if you don't have a hammer drill that's fine I don't have a hammer drill this time around I'm gonna use a regular drill to demonstrate just a VSR drill you get the tapcon screw kit from your local building store and you get the one that has the bit in it so you always have the drill bit that's the right size you won't be disappointed now without the hammer drill function just takes a little bit longer but still very effective okay you see how long that that hole is we just set our screw here hello puppy now feel that listen to that torque that isn't going anywhere [Music] there's nobody gonna be able to rip that out of the wall that's not the concern because our 4x4 post is right into the frame if this is a surface mount maybe that's a concern and you might want to open the wall from the other side and block it and drive yourself an eight inch screw in there but dear Lord that's a lot of work to avoid having to put a post into the front into the framing very important when it comes time to do your skirting let's know which kind you want to go with here we're gonna go with more of a solid skirt we're looking for animal control because we don't get direct Sun in this area we're not so concerned about air passing through if you do get direct Sun I would suggest going with like a privacy lattice so you get a little bit of large animal control and wind but since we don't need that here we're gonna go for a nice clean look that works I've got a nice gap under here I get my pan underneath the other thing you want to think about is decoratively speaking you don't want to have them meeting up like that you want one covering the other and I would always suggest that the place that you want it to be the prettiest is the one you want to put on last so this is our street view so we'll put that on last we're gonna start here with this one again putting this screw flush with the wood you don't want to bury it okay this is the screw that you want to be able to pull out if you ever need to get access underneath your deck so if you bury it there's a little swell and then when you try to take it out you'll destroy your wood two inches down when you get near the middle stop start at the other end with a full board and come towards the middle again I'll show you why if when you get to the middle you're left with a gap like this you don't want to cut a board to fit that hole that's that nasty what you do is you take the total amount of width of all of this these two boards plus the gap divide it by three and then cut three boards the same width it's still all three of those here and that'll make that gap just take a probably three-quarters of an inch off of this board this board on this board and then you won't even know that the boards are a different size and you will get stuck with a little sliver one of the ends and don't forget finish your entire skirt before you start building your stairs one because it's really hard to work behind the staircase and two if you put your skirt up to this area up to where the stairs are you have to close the side of the stairs right to the ground where you lose the ability to maintain your critters so finish the entire skirt and then it'll be stare time all right so now it comes time for the stairs and you've got a couple of options out there whenever you're dealing with black metal is for your finishing work you can always go to the building store and they'll have pre-made black metal stair risers for you and you just screw the deck boards from underneath into that that's a doable system but only if you've got the same sort of height requirements as a traditional eight inch rise step so if it's a little bit different you gotta do something custom then that's not gonna be any good for you you can always buy the wooden ones that come pre-made as well and you can shave the top and bottom a little bit but remember code in most places and what people are used to is that every step is the same height rise and run length so if you start making modifications like that you getting up with really long odd kind of shape steps and the natural function of people going up and down stairs is a is abruptly changed so you can be coming down stairs engaged in conversation not paying attention and almost fall all over yourself just because the heights wrong so what you want to do is you want to make sure every step is exactly the same give or take about a quarter inch on exterior applications I would even go give or take a half an inch just to make life simple okay now I am thinking of the street when you're looking at my stair because I'm making all of this out of cedar I'm not going to finish it with any other surface boards other than the top so what I've done is I've created a little bit of blocking I'm just gonna map this out so it makes some sense okay we can visualize this together and the back actually sits inside the two of the outsides so I try to keep the homeowners in mind when I'm designing these things and doing videos I try to use the same sort of building materials and tools you're gonna have access to there are faster ways to build framing air tools and all that sort of thing with a proper exterior fasteners but to be totally honest I know most people don't have access to those kinds of tools and why would you how often in your life are you gonna be framing a deck [Music] [Music] [Applause] so I'm getting a little bit ridiculous with how many screws buddy [Music] I daresay people would find anybody who's able to just walk over rip this apart they're gonna need some serious tools so now this post is built into the frame the frame is attached to the frame of the deck and that is really really solid when I get the handrail on there it's gonna be invincible testimony to the guy that put these papers down originally not too often you see this but I built my stare directly on these pavers and I have these two posts cut exactly the same length and they're sitting on the paver inside the box screwed them together check that in both if you start level you build level so now we got our box in place put my second box on and I'm just covering it with a five quarter board so I made all my box is the same size I cut all my floorboards first from lining up so when I'm building this and I have to work my way around I gotta do a little jigsaw [Music] [Music] [Applause] what we're gonna do right now is demonstrate a simple railing system that is attractive and forgiving which is important and you can see that it'll actually make some sense so that's where it goes okay you see how my line is perpendicular the basel if that straight up in the air that hole will be directly above that hole the gap remains constant these are awesome now listen we are gonna go through this again these comes set for a traditional 42 inch railing system which is great if you're building something to code so somebody doesn't fall off your stairs and plunge to their ultimate demise but what we're doing is just creating a safety railing for Grandma to come home and visit and she's not all that tall so what we did is we took the top off and I ran it through the saw this is just aluminum and it's powder coated so boom we cut it down so that when grandma's climbing this railing she isn't wholly railing above her head because it's obviously 42 inches that's that's hard most older people don't have a lot of strength in their shoulders and they're using their bicep and tricep muscles when they're going up a railing and so when you're setting safety rails and bathrooms it's usually pretty low so they can have their arms straight to their body and they can grab something like this okay so if your handrail is up like this even if she's holding on to it and she slips she's gonna let go she doesn't have the strength to hold her body weight if she slips at that part angle so make sure when you've got a railing and you're thinking about older people cut it down if you got an opportunity if you don't make it extra wide and put on a second handrail for what you want to do just get down here close one eye yeah weird look on your face line that up and then murder [Music] [Applause] [Music] and then we'll double-check because if you cut it too long it won't fit into place and they won't but that's fine because I can cut it shorter I can't cut it even longer the second time makes it good no daylight through there that is perfect loving it so I'm gonna do is I'm gonna just create flush to flush here and here relatively speaking I'm gonna trace this oh that was that was really too sick whatever how many why would I give for a 3ds this is the part of the job where I really piss off the safety trolls haha yes I'm using my saw without a pair of glasses because I'd like to be able to see what I'm doing when I'm doing crazy things like this now I'm gonna line up my cut I'm holding my my safety blade my guard out of the way I'm gonna line this up and I'm gonna go [Applause] [Music] that's much better and from the other side and the other angle oh I feel like I'm auditioning for America's Got Talent [Music] look at that where do I get a golden buzzer here we go ladies and gentlemen of the jury [Music] I'm gonna take this one extra step I'm gonna put it right into the post help line it all up here's my top plate cut it and that will put our 45 on corners in a little bit where it comes to the rail just clean it up cause we like our soft edges [Music] look mama without a mask [Music] [Applause] [Music] when the grandmas come you let them know this is all for them and you get what you can get out of it max [Music] well there we go welcome to the end of our project I am so pleased with the way this turned out really surprised actually how well this turned out we didn't really expect this dramatic of a transformation from the beginning I don't know why but sometimes when you look at something that just doesn't look very good you think it's hopeless and not salvageable and this was a great example of how to salvage something that already exists so this is exactly the same frame with a couple modifications of course it's reface all over with my really simple deck finishing system some decorative LED lights on top everything is soft cornered and polished and sanded ok now don't forget when you're going to take a project like this on if you don't want to go with the cedar root because of the cost you have other options there's a Sienna Brown of course there's regular pressure treated a lot of those products take a lot more maintenance long term this we can just sand it stick it in place give it a couple weeks put a finish coat on it seal it up and walk away and enjoy for the rest of the summer all right so really glad you could join us on this I couldn't be more proud if you have any questions on how to build a project or if you have something you think you can't save and you want to try to salvage it pick my brain and go into the comments section ask your questions I'll answer them myself every day sometimes max jumps into if you've got technical questions related to the process of making these videos feel free to bug him and ask him questions he jumps in there too don't forget to check us out on Instagram we've got a brand new page we're trying to build so we'd love to get your feedback on that as well subscribe to our channel if you haven't because we are the place to be if you want to learn anything about home renovation and how to maintain your property and make money in your own home we'll see you again next time [Music] so I hope you enjoyed this episode of reality Rena vision if you're new to our channel the nice to suggest you subscribe to the channel over here don't forget to hit the bell icon for notifications so you'll be told every time a new video comes up and if you'd like you can click the link right here and you can binge watch all the episodes that we have on our playlist amazing information everything DIY and de car and renovation and remodeling thanks for joining us

Channel: REALITY RENOVISION

Views: 362,398

Rating: 4.8649349 out of 5

Keywords: jeff thorman, home renovision, home renovision diy, renovation reality show, remodel reality show, renovation show, home reno, home remodel, reapiring deck, how to fix your deck, deck repairs, diy deck repairs, diy deck, deck building, diy front porch, cedar deck build, fixing structure, cheap deck repair, cheap deck build, easy deck build, easy deck repair

Id: 6eA1yS_StA8

Length: 60min 38sec (3638 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 24 2020