Replacing Old Wood Deck with Composite // Hidden Fasteners

today on shop nation we give a tired old sunroom deck a facelift by replacing the rough treated wood decking with new composite decking including hidden fasteners what's up you guys i'm travis this is shop nation and because the weather is beautiful outside i decided we're going to do an outdoor project we're going to be redecking the sun room on the back of our house now this is essentially just a screened-in porch so if you've got an outdoor deck everything i'm going through today would be applicable there as well so one of the many selling points of this house is this sunroom my wife and i want to convert this into sort of an outdoor living room but as i mentioned it's basically just a screened-in porch with two doors and the only real issue with this room however is the decking itself now this is treated wood that was i'm guessing installed originally when the house was built in 1999 and what i want to do is replace it with composite decking and there's two reasons for that the first of which is it will eliminate splinters you see we want to walk out here barefoot a lot we've got a year old now and some of these boards have some rough edges that could cause some issues so the composite decking obviously doesn't splinter so that's going to solve that problem the second issue and really it's more of a pet peeve than an issue is that you can see all the fasteners on this existing decking now some of those are raised from the board itself so again the barefoot issue so with the composite decking i'm going to use hidden fasteners which brings us to the sponsor of this video which is craig toole now if you've never heard of craig tools look them up they're awesome they're basically your best friend when it comes to building stuff whether it be furniture cabinets whatever and they actually have a tool specifically for installing decking with hidden fasteners now craig was nice enough to send me the deck jig for free to try out along with a bunch of deck screws specifically for the jig and this system works with just about any type of decking you can think of so i've been using craig tool products well before i even got on youtube they just plain work which is why i know that this deck jig is gonna work awesome but basically the way this thing works is you've got these three drill guides that drill at an angle into the decking so that when the decking is butted up against each other you don't see any fasteners from the top the kit even comes with these little spacers to make sure all of your decking has even gaps and also comes with both a drill and a driver for driving in those screws to the perfect depth and by the way if you want to check out this deck jig along with some other favorites that i have from craig i'll link those down in the video description below so you can go check those out now the advantage of replacing existing decking is that i've already got a template to work from this means that any of the edge pieces that have weird cutouts for things like trim or doorways i can just replicate on the new decking so the first thing i need to do is rip up all this existing decking which i'm going to try not to destroy because i want to use it for maybe a future project hashtag holywood prices but i want to pay special attention to the edge pieces i can use as a template to make my life easier so right off the bat i noticed two things that are going to make this job a little bit less straightforward one they use both screws and nails when installing the decking boards which means i'm gonna have to pry every board off and two the end fasteners are impossible to get to which means i have to kind of wiggle and pry them out of there and here's where i first realized the edge pieces were actually going to be really tricky to remove i mean this thing is hardly budging now for things like strip screws or buried nails i had to break out the reciprocating saw to cut through them from underneath [Music] but after a while i found my groove getting most of the boards up [Music] so yeah remember i was talking about keeping the edges pristine so that i can transfer that to the new decking well that's pretty much a bust you see whoever built this place in their infinite wisdom thought it'd be great to deck everything and then put all your trim down which means that all the edge nails and fasteners are all buried underneath the trim now you could say well why don't you just take out the trim and then you can have access to them and i thought that might be a good idea but there's way too much and it goes all the way up the sides so now what i think i have to do is basically just cut underneath the board cut through all the nails and pull the boards out which is of course super time consuming and annoying but you know wouldn't be a diy project unless there was chaos right right you know what they say when life gives you lemons break out the hammer or break out the power tools no that's not it i thought i would channel some of my frustration and just try to beat these end pieces to see if i could persuade them out and it actually kind of worked [Music] okay so with that the deck deconstruction or deck structure whatever the heck you want to call it is now done and by far the hardest part was getting all those edge pieces out from underneath the trim anyhow now would be the time where i could just throw on some composite decking we'll wrap up the video we'll all go on our merry way it turns out that for conventional decking at least when this house was built code was 24-inch on-center floor joists when you're using composite decking most brands do not allow 24-inch spacing on the joists now i really contemplated just rolling with it how bad could it be but i'm also a proponent of doing things right [Music] so really my only option is to add a joist between each of these joists making 12 inch on center which is more than enough for composite decking it's only really a 11 and a half foot span so i really don't think two by tens are totally necessary but what the hell do i know so i guess that means i need to get hangers put in a joist between all these and then we could add our composite decking it turns out that a quick reference to a joy spacing chart showed me that i can actually get away with using two by eights instead of the installed two by tens and with today's lumber prices that's a savings of 596 thousand dollars i am all ears for more efficient ways to install joist hangers i'm using a piece of scrap 2x8 to make sure my top edge is flush with the existing joists this worked okay but it just seemed like it took forever [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Music] after nailing all the joists into those hangers i can move on to setting the first piece of composite decking in place now i made sure this was firmly up against the house since this would basically dictate the alignment of all the other boards after it [Music] i created a pattern of 24 inch length changes between neighboring boards don't be a complete dingleberry and line up all of your joints one tip i have is to always work off of fresh cuts on each end of the composite boards yes it means you make two times the cuts but your joints will look much better [Music] later so after using this jig for a while i again fell into a groove and the first thing is that i would really recommend having two impact drivers or drills handy one with the drill bit and the other with the driver bit as you make your way down the boards you'll shift everything down with you the shuffle makes sure everything is in reach when you need it i alternated the direction of the screws on every other joist which seemed to work great i really liked the angled guides for the ends of the boards as well for those ends i made sure to add a screw on both sides my son's supervising made for an interesting juggling act to get everything secured while simultaneously making sure he didn't drill a hole in his hand or swallow too many screws mission accomplished i think [Music] so [Music] and that is a wrap now just a quick reminder if you saw a tool or material that you saw me use that you're interested in i'll try and link those in the video description below so go check those out if you were going to do any kind of decking project i would highly recommend the craig deck jig it came in super handy i love how you can't see any fasteners i just think it turned out really good i appreciate each and every one of you for watching if you're new here consider subscribing if you enjoy the video hit the like button and then tell me what you thought about the project down in the comments or cite some local building code and tell me how i did it wrong if you've got an outdoor project enjoy this nice weather get out there and do it i'll catch you guys on the next project and until then continue to pursue shop greatness

Channel: Shop Nation

Views: 54,404

Rating: 4.9696608 out of 5

Keywords: shopnation, composite decking, shop nation, install composite decking, Kreg Deck Jig, how to replace decking, replace decking, new decking, new deck, deck refresh, DIY deck, DIY decking, replace deck, new deck boards, DIY composite deck, Trex decking, hidden fasteners, hidden deck screws, how to hide deck screws, deck, decking, composite lumber, wood deck, sunroom, porch, restore deck, deck refinish, composite deck

Id: S5BcaLz6WiY

Length: 10min 19sec (619 seconds)

Published: Tue May 25 2021