Quick Tip: Inlay Patterns & Break Ideas || Dr Decks

[Music] hey guys dr dex here today i want to talk to you about decking patterns and inlays and why we install certain decks a certain way so if that makes sense to you or you like this video or you learned something about it please don't forget to click that subscribe button and hit the bell icon to be notified when we're putting out new content all right so we're gonna get right into it we are standing on a dock that we just finished this week and it has a special pattern and some inlays in it and i want to explain to you why usually when i build i try to make sense of the lengths of decking that are available to me so when i design a deck i know that most of synthetic decking i like to use primarily timbertech azac so azac comes in three lengths 12s 16s and 20s so i always try to design around that parameter i'm not big on doing a lot of 45 degree patterns or herringbone angles and things like that in my decks i like to run things linear either perpendicular or horizontal to the house depending on the joist framing or on a particular job recently that we did maybe you followed along we actually framed the deck on a 45 degree angle then we still laid the decking perpendicular and horizontal but it was all in the same plane and that's a great example of a deck that we built that has a pattern in it so on this particular dock the dock was 24 feet wide almost 24 feet the client had already framed the dock so i was left to the task of figuring out how to install those boards now in particular i didn't want to run a random pattern i don't like to run random patterns and pvc decking when you try to butt joint something over the top of a joist it doesn't usually stay together usually you got to seam it with two joists or a cleat and then run an inch and a half for each piece because it's a dock we wanted to face screw the decking to the joist so we used the fastenmaster cortex hidden fastening system to do that but you'll notice that this dock has 20 foot boards in the middle of it and then there's a border that goes around the dock three boards wide on each side so that adds an additional almost three feet to the overall width of the dock so i have a 20 foot center actually it's a little over three feet so it's a 20 foot center and then three boards on the right and three boards on the left which got me to the 23 foot four inches or whatever the width of this dock ended up being but i had to pre-plan it i actually had to shrink the dock with a little bit so that i could make the triple border work if if not i would have had to go to a quadruple border but i just felt three boards wide would be the ticket so what we have here is the 20 foot boards in the middle and then you'll notice in the corners we did a staggered seam instead of miters because i'm not big on miters we did a i call it a herringbone pattern where you butt joint and you overlap each board as it goes everybody thinks that's really easy to do piece of cake man that's so much easier than miters well it's a different set of skills than miters it's not like a cakewalk all right you still have to plan it out and make sure your legs are right and because it was over 20 feet from end to end i had to put a seam board in the middle right here like an accent piece and these aren't always going to be square like this board i can tell you right now is not square so gapping is important as well i like to gap all my boards the same i don't i don't gap a board 3 16 in the field and then change it to some other size gap somewhere else on the deck i like to gap everything the same so in this particular build we had some unique features we have a 20-foot center inlay we have every corner has a herringbone pattern and then in the middle of each herringbone run we have a board that breaks for a breaker board a seam board a soldier board whatever you want to call them one of those in the middle as well and that's repeated on every run so when you take an overall look of the dock it's in unison everything has purpose everything breaks intentionally and it breaks purposefully that way when pvc moves because pvc will expand and contract it gives it somewhere to move it gives it somewhere to breathe and we're not trying to get it to move back and forth on a pattern or on a random joist like this everything's broken the same lines so things will ebb and flow all at one purpose all at one point so that's really important to me and my clients get that attention to detail on every single deck that we build i hope that answers some of your questions of why we built this the way we did and you can see multiple samples of different projects that we've built where i'm intentionally breaking boards not always on a square not always on a line or a rectangle a lot of times i'm breaking things on a curve so as long as i can get my 20 foot board to make that length then i can cut it any way i want you just got to make sure that you're blocking that the proper way so that you can break your boards right so for an example if we come over to the corner you just can't lay a standard joist set in here and expect all these boards to be able to be screwed down properly you have to add solid blocking so we do a lot of solid blocking details into our frame so that i can put the screws wherever i want now the idea behind that is well doctor if you're going to do that isn't that bad for the frame won't it rot away usually i'd say yeah it will but if you protect it with some g-tape or some waterproof peel and stick it's gonna last a lot longer and it's gonna keep the boards from rotting out prematurely or having an issue in the future because you've covered them with a waterproof membrane tape so i hope that uh answers some of your questions as well all right so i hope that answers some of your questions today if you have any more leave them below if you're looking for more samples don't hesitate to go through our youtube videos or go over to our instagram page and check it out and you can see multiple examples of how we've broken deck boards in a pattern or on a specific shape or line to give it more interest so thanks for watching guys have a great day don't forget to leave your comments below and like our videos thank you

Channel: drdecks

Views: 5,980

Rating: 4.688623 out of 5

Keywords: Dr decks, drdecks, deck building, custom decks, pacific northwest, carpentry, decks, deck, deck board bending

Id: 8FFcPSqAksM

Length: 6min 31sec (391 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021