Soft deck boards, rotten posts and stairs, fixed

Often, yes. If the rot is in a board, a post or part of a joist, we cut out the bad wood and replace only that. If the main frame is too far gone, we tell you at the inspection and show you the moisture readings. We never replace more than we have to.

Press a screwdriver into the wood. If it sinks in easily, or the wood is soft, dark, crumbly or spongy, it is probably rotten. Check the ends of boards, around posts and the rim joist near the house. A moisture meter gives a clear answer, and our 20-point inspection is free.

Yes. We do deck repair and deck repairs across Vancouver, North Vancouver, West Vancouver, Burnaby and Richmond. Book a free inspection and we come out, look at the deck and give you a plain answer.

Wood rot is all we do. We repair rotten deck boards, posts, joists, ledgers and railings, and we find the water problem that caused the rot so the repair lasts.

Three spots account for most of the deck rot we find, and they fail for three different reasons. The ledger board, the piece bolted directly to the house that the deck actually hangs from, fails when it was installed without proper flashing tape or flashing, water runs down the house wall, gets behind the ledger, and sits there against wood that's structurally critical and completely hidden from view. Joist ends fail from the same repeated wetting-and-drying cycle at any point where a joist meets a beam or ledger without a protective cap, especially under decking boards with tight gaps that trap debris and moisture. Post bases fail when a post sits in a concrete footing or metal bracket that holds standing water against the end grain, the most absorbent part of any piece of lumber, for days after every rain.

If you take one thing away from this page, it's this: the ledger board connection is the single most common structural failure point on a Metro Vancouver deck, and it's also the one homeowners are least likely to ever see, since it's covered by decking above and siding or trim to the side. Proper ledger flashing means a continuous flashing membrane that directs water away from the ledger-to-house connection entirely, installed before the ledger goes up, not caulked on afterward as an afterthought. When that flashing was skipped, installed incorrectly, or has failed over time, water finds its way behind the ledger and it starts rotting from the inside, often for years, before any visible sign appears at the surface.

A rotted ledger board isn't a cosmetic problem the way peeling paint is, it's the connection responsible for holding the entire deck structure to your house, and deck collapses in North America are disproportionately traced back to exactly this failure point. We treat a suspected ledger issue with that urgency: if a moisture reading and inspection confirm significant rot at the ledger, we'll tell you plainly that this affects whether the deck is safe to use in its current state, not just whether it needs a repair on your timeline. The same applies, to a lesser degree, to significant rot at multiple joist ends or post bases, since those are the other points actually carrying the structure's load.

A soft or spongy feel when you press on the rim joist near the house, staining on the siding directly above the ledger, or a deck that feels slightly different underfoot near the house connection are all signs worth an inspection. The only way to know for certain is opening it up or getting a moisture reading from the accessible side.

Almost always cheaper to correct the ledger connection and flashing if the rest of the structure is sound, we assess the whole frame, not just the one spot, before making that call.

Ledger flashing done wrong at construction can fail within just a few years, age alone doesn't tell you whether it was installed correctly the first time.

The whole structure, ledger, joists, posts, and beams, since a problem at one connection point often means the same installation issue exists at the others.