Most people call about a deck because of how it looks. The answer almost never comes from the surface.
Boards are cheap and quick to change. Joists, the ledger where the deck meets the house, and the posts underneath are neither — and those are what decide whether you are buying a repair or a rebuild.
The test takes thirty seconds
Push a screwdriver into a board, hard, at an angle. If it sinks in with no resistance, that timber has gone. If it resists and leaves a dent, the wood is sound under a grey surface — and that is a cleaning and staining job, not a repair.
Do it in three or four places, including one board right against the house. That last one matters most.
The ledger is the part nobody checks
The ledger is the beam bolted to the house that the deck hangs from. Water gets behind it, sits there, and rots it from the back — so it can look perfect and be failing. It is also the single most common cause of a deck collapsing.
We check it on every visit, and we photograph what we find.
What a repair usually covers
Replacing failed boards, resetting loose railings, tightening or replacing fixings, and treating the timber that is staying. On a deck with a sound frame that is a day or two.
When it is a rebuild
When posts move under load, when the ledger is soft, or when more than a third of the joists take the screwdriver. At that point new boards are being fixed to something that will not hold them.
Deck repair covers the work, and deck staining covers the cheaper answer. Finished work is on our Facebook page.
