Deck Repair for Dummies

Replacing a deck board

As luck would have it, the staff of the Antisocial Network are, at this very moment, working on refreshing the deck at headquarters. It looks as though a few of the deck boards are terminal, meaning that they'll have to be pulled off and replaced with something sturdier. Truth be told, all that's going to entail is backing out the screws. Apparently, though, not everyone's deck repairs would be so simple: check on what eHowian Kenneth Crawford said to do in the HomeSteady.com post, "How to Remove Old Deck Boards."¹

Crawford could, apparently, only conceive of one problem, and that's decking that had been nailed in place instead of screwed. Really? No one's nailed a deck since about 1971!  Be that as it may, Kenny (already a three-time winner) found some reasonably good instructions at This Old House and – as required by his contract with DMS² – reworded them.

That's where the problems came in... when Crawford vomited up content like this introduction:

"One way to keep your deck looking good is to replace old deck boards that have splits or rotten spots. Replacing deck boards rmeans [sic] removing old deck boards."

Yeah, sure: we thought you'd just nail new ones over the old ones...  Crawford went on to tell us all to,

"Drill a hole at the center of each end of the board you are replacing with a 1/2-inch arbor hole saw."

WTF is a "arbor hole saw," anyway? Why not just a drill bit? But the instructions get more... clueless as he goes on:

"Insert the blade of your jig saw in the holes and cut across the board at one end. Cut the other end of the board off while a friend holds the board from falling. Remove the cut portion of the board."

Yeah, OK, that sort of makes sense, except for one thing: in what universe does every deck board reach across one gap between joists? We're getting a sense of Crawford's ignorance... and now it's confirmed:

"Slide a crowbar between the deck joists and remaining ends of the board. Push down on the crowbar to raise to pry [sic] the board nails up and remove the ends from each joist."

OK, we figured out what the instructions Crawford cribbed from TOH were supposed to be: remove a section of the deck board from the middle, cutting it short of two adjacent joists. Then pry up the remaining sections. Our Dumbass of the Day couldn't figure out the part about cutting between two consecutive joists. Maybe he should have asked someone who knew what he was talking about?

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_7103927_remove-old-deck-boards.html
² DMS was Demand Media Studios, parent company of eHow.com (now known as Leaf Group), Like we always say, "You can't spell 'dumbass' without 'DMS'!"

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