Customer Service: (253) 677-0290
Customer Service: (253) 677-0290
By Daniel Rotaru, owner of Decks Restore. Washington contractor license CC DECKSRL797P2. Building decks in Maple Valley and the South Sound since 2011.
Almost every composite client asks some version of this question, usually at the point where they have already picked the board and the railing. They want to know whether the screws will show.
The honest answer is that we use both systems on almost every deck we build, and the interesting part is where the line falls between them.
A fully hidden deck is possible and we build them. But the places where hidden fasteners cannot physically go are the same places that take the most abuse: stair treads, the perimeter board, anywhere a board gets cut around a post. So the real decision is not hidden or face screwed. It is how much of the deck gets each, and whether the visible fasteners are done well enough that you stop noticing them.
Here is how the two systems actually behave on a Maple Valley deck, including the things that only show up after a few winters under tree cover.
“Hidden fastener” covers four different approaches that behave differently, which is part of why homeowners get confused comparing quotes.
The most common. The decking has a milled groove down both edges, and a clip sits in the groove and screws down into the joist, holding the board on each side. Most composite manufacturers sell their own version, and several third-party systems work across brands.
The clip sets the gap between boards automatically, which is both the selling point and the limitation. You get whatever spacing the clip was designed for, usually somewhere around 3/16 of an inch.
A jig holds the driver at an angle so the screw goes through the side of the board, through the groove, and into the joist. No clip, so the gap is whatever you set it to. Slower per board than clips but it lets you choose your spacing, and that matters here more than most places.
The board is face screwed normally, then a plug cut from the same decking material is tapped into the counterbore over the screw head. From standing height it reads as a grain mark rather than a fastener. This is how you get a hidden look in the places where clips are impossible.
A slot is cut in the board edge and a connector sits in it. Common on some hardwood and a few composite installations, less so on the products we install most in Maple Valley.
Face screwing, by contrast, means a composite-specific screw driven through the top of the board into the joist. The good ones have a reverse thread or a cutting feature under the head that pulls the mushroomed material back down flush, and they come in colours matched to each manufacturer’s decking line.
Wood moves with moisture, mostly across its width. Composite moves with temperature, mostly along its length. Anyone who has worked with both finds this counterintuitive at first.
The practical scale of it: a 16 foot composite board can change length by something in the region of a quarter inch between a cold January morning and a hot August afternoon in direct sun. On a deck that sees a 100 degree swing in surface temperature, which a dark board in a sunny Maple Valley gap absolutely does, you have real movement to accommodate at the ends of every board.
This is where the two systems genuinely differ.
A clip holds the board edge in the groove but allows it to slide lengthwise. The board can grow and shrink without fighting the fastener. That is a real engineering advantage and it is the main technical argument for hidden systems on composite.
A face screw pins the board to the joist at every point it passes through. The board still wants to move, so the movement has to go somewhere. With correctly specified screws and proper end gaps, it goes into slight elongation at the fastener holes and nothing bad happens. With screws driven too tight, or with inadequate gaps at the butt joints and at the house, you get buckling, or you get screws that work loose over a few seasons.
The gaps matter more than the fastener type here. Every composite manufacturer publishes an end gap schedule tied to the installation temperature, and following it is not optional. We install to those numbers and record the installation temperature on the job file, because on a cool Maple Valley morning in March the required gap is noticeably larger than it would be in July.
This is the argument I make most often and the one that almost never comes up in a showroom.
A clip system sets your board spacing for you. Whatever the clip was designed for is what you get, typically around 3/16 of an inch. In a tidy suburban yard with no overhanging trees, that is fine.
Maple Valley is not a tidy suburban yard. A deck under Douglas fir takes needle drop year round, a heavy pollen load for three weeks in late spring, and big-leaf maple leaves every autumn. All of that lands in the gaps. Needles in particular stand on end and wedge in, and once the gap is packed the deck stops draining between the boards.
A deck that does not drain between boards in this climate holds standing water on the surface after heavy rain, stays damp underneath far longer than it should, and grows moss along the board edges. None of that destroys a composite deck, because composite does not rot. It does make the deck look neglected, it makes the surface slippery through the winter, and it keeps the framing underneath wetter than it needs to be.
So on a treed Maple Valley lot we will often argue for a slightly wider gap than a clip gives you, which means either an edge-screwed hidden system where we set the spacing, or face screwing. Clients who insist on clips under heavy canopy are told plainly that they are signing up for clearing the gaps a couple of times a year with a thin blade or a blower.
There is a maintenance workaround either way. A proper under-deck drainage system changes the calculation, because the water is being managed below the boards rather than relying on the gaps alone.
Most people who hate the look of face screws are reacting to face screws done badly, and the failure mode is specific.
Composite is softer than wood under a screw head. Drive a standard deck screw into it and the material displaces, pushing up a raised ring around the head. The industry calls it mushrooming. It catches the light, it catches bare feet, and once you have eighty of them across a deck surface the whole thing reads as cheap.
There are three ways it goes wrong. The wrong screw, meaning a standard wood deck screw instead of a composite-specific one with a cutting feature under the head that trims the displaced material back flush. No depth control, meaning the installer is eyeballing it and some screws sit proud while others are countersunk too deep. And driving into a cold board in the morning and a hot board in the afternoon without adjusting, because composite behaves differently at different temperatures.
Done properly, with a colour-matched composite screw, a depth-setting attachment on the driver, and a crew that checks the setting as conditions change through the day, face screws on a mid-tone variegated board are genuinely unobtrusive. You notice them if you look for them and you stop seeing them within a week of living with the deck.
The other thing that separates good face screwing from bad is layout. Screws aligned in straight lines down each joist line, consistent distance from the board edge, same count per board. An inconsistent pattern is far more visible than the screws themselves, which is why the first thing I check on a competitor’s deck is whether the fastener lines are straight.
This is the part of the comparison that almost never makes it into a sales conversation, and it is the most interesting technical argument in favour of face screws.
A deck surface fastened down tightly at two points per board per joist behaves a bit like sheathing. It ties the joists together and resists the frame racking side to side. It is not as effective as plywood, because individual boards are narrower and there are gaps between them, but it contributes real stiffness to the structure.
A hidden fastener system is designed to let each board slide lengthwise, which is exactly what you want for thermal movement and exactly what removes that stiffening contribution. The trade publication Journal of Light Constructioncovered this well, quoting a Virginia Tech structural engineer on the point: attaching decking in a way that permits movement lends less rigidity to the structure, and only systems that fix each board rigidly at two points per joist come close to the diaphragm you get from conventional fastening. The same article traces the squeaking complaints that have followed hidden fasteners since the late 1980s back to this.
For most decks this does not matter, because the lateral resistance is supposed to come from the frame rather than from the decking. Hold-downs at the ledger, proper bracing, adequate posts. The decking stiffness is a bonus, not part of the design.
It starts to matter on tall decks on sloped lots, which describes a lot of Maple Valley. On those builds we are already paying close attention to lateral bracing and the hold-down connections, and losing the diaphragm contribution from the decking is a reason to be more rather than less thorough about the frame. It is not a reason to avoid hidden fasteners. It is a reason to make sure whoever installs them has braced the structure properly underneath.
On squeaks specifically: they come from movement between the clip and the board or the clip and the joist. Clips installed to the manufacturer’s torque, joists that are straight and properly crowned, and in some systems a bead of construction adhesive where the manufacturer permits it, mostly eliminate them. Sloppy installation on a wavy frame is what produces a deck that talks to you.
Nobody thinks about this at the quoting stage and everybody thinks about it eventually.
A face screwed board comes out in about four minutes. Back out the screws, lift the board, do whatever you needed to do, put it back. We do this when a client wants to run electrical for lighting after the fact, when a joist needs attention, when something heavy has been dropped and gouged one board, or when a plumber needs access to a hose bib that ended up under the deck.
A clipped board does not come out that way. The clips are captured in the grooves of the boards on both sides, so you cannot lift one board out of the middle of a field without releasing its neighbours. In practice you either work in from the nearest edge, removing boards in sequence, or you cut the board out and patch in a new one with face screws, which puts visible fasteners in exactly the spot where you were trying to avoid them.
Some systems handle this better than others. A few clips can be reached and released with a thin tool from above. Edge-screwed systems are easier than clips because you can get a driver at the screws from the gap. Plug systems are the easiest of all, because the plug can be drilled out and a fresh one tapped in.
This is a real consideration on a deck that is going to be around for 25 years, and it is a strong argument for using plugs rather than clips in the areas most likely to need access later: around the hose bib, over any point where the framing might need inspection, and on the boards nearest the house.
This is the part that surprises clients who were quoted a “fully hidden” deck, and it is worth knowing before you sign anything.
A clip needs a groove on both sides of the board and a joist underneath to screw into. Any time one of those is missing, you are face screwing, with or without a plug.
The perimeter board. The outside edge of the last board has no neighbour to clip to. It gets fastened through the face.
Picture frame borders. The mitred border running around the deck edge sits across the joists rather than along them, and it needs blocking underneath and fasteners through the top.
Stair treads. Short boards, high traffic, fastened at the nose where you need mechanical hold rather than a sliding clip. We face screw every stair tread, every time, and I would be sceptical of anyone who told you otherwise.
Boards cut around posts. The moment a board is notched around a railing post or a column, the groove continuity is gone on that side.
The first board against the house. Often no room to work a clip into the groove on the wall side.
Add those up and even a well-executed hidden deck has visible fastening somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of its surface, concentrated exactly where people stand and look. Which is why the quality of the face screwing matters on a hidden deck too, and why plugs are worth the extra labour on those specific areas.
Composite warranties are conditional on installation following the manufacturer’s published instructions, and fastening is one of the areas they are specific about.
What to check before anyone orders material:
The joist spacing one catches people out on resurfacing projects more than anything else. A frame built for 2×6 cedar at 24 inches on centre will not take composite without adding joists or sistering in intermediate support, and that cost belongs in the quote at the start rather than appearing as a change order. We check it before quoting any deck resurfacingjob.
We also install joist tape under the decking on every composite build. Water follows fasteners down into the top of a joist, which is exactly where the preservative treatment is thinnest after the lumber has been cut. In a climate where the frame stays damp for months, a strip of self-adhesive flashing tape across every joist top is the cheapest life extension available on the whole structure.
Our default on a composite deck here is a hybrid, and it is not a compromise so much as the arrangement that puts each system where it works.
Hidden fasteners through the open field of the deck. On a treed lot we lean towards an edge-screwed system rather than clips, because it lets us set the gap wider than a clip would and keep the boards draining through needle drop season. On an open lot with no overhanging trees, clips are quicker and perfectly fine.
Face screws with colour-matched plugs on the perimeter board, the picture frame border, around posts and anywhere we expect someone may need access later. From standing height these read as grain, and they preserve the ability to take a board out without dismantling half the deck.
Straightforward face screws, no plugs, on stair treads. Mechanical hold matters more than appearance on the one part of a deck where a failure hurts someone, and treads get replaced more often than field boards anyway.
Joist tape across every joist top, under everything.
We tell clients the honest version of the trade-off rather than selling the upgrade for its own sake. If the deck is a simple rectangle in an open yard and the budget is tight, well-executed face screwing on a variegated board is a good deck and the money is better spent on the framing underneath. If it is a large, visible, architectural deck where the surface is the point, hidden fasteners through the field are worth what they cost.
What we will not do is quote “hidden fasteners” and then face screw the border and stairs without having said so. That is where most of the disappointment in this category comes from.
Two things move when you go hidden: the fastener material, and the labour. The labour is the bigger of the two, and it is the one that gets hidden inside a square-foot price where you cannot see it.
| Face screwed | Hidden, clips | Hidden, plugs | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fastener material, 400 sq ft | Roughly $150 to $250 | Roughly $400 to $700 | Roughly $350 to $600 |
| Board cost | Standard board | Grooved board, sometimes a small premium | Standard board |
| Installation time, 400 sq ft | Baseline | Add roughly a day | Add roughly a day and a half |
| Typical added cost on a 400 sq ft deck | Baseline | $1,200 to $2,500 | $1,500 to $3,000 |
| Board removal later | Minutes | Difficult mid-field | Drill the plug, straightforward |
| Gap control | You set it | Fixed by the clip | You set it |
The plug route costs more than clips in labour because every screw is counterbored and every plug is cut, tapped and trimmed by hand. It buys a near-hidden appearance with none of the removal problems, which is why we use it on the areas that matter rather than across a whole deck.
If a quote shows hidden fasteners and is not meaningfully higher than a face screwed quote for the same board, something is being left out. Ask which specific system, which areas get it, and what happens at the border and the stairs.
No. Face screwing gives a more rigid attachment, and that rigidity contributes some stiffness to the frame. Hidden fasteners are designed to let boards move lengthwise, which is better for thermal expansion and worse for stiffness. Neither is a safety issue on a properly braced deck. Hidden fasteners are an appearance upgrade, not a structural one.
They can, and the complaint has followed the category since the 1980s. The cause is movement between the clip and the board or joist. A straight, well-crowned frame, clips installed to the manufacturer’s spec, and adhesive where the manufacturer allows it will mostly prevent it. Squeaks usually trace back to a wavy frame rather than to the clips themselves.
Clips need a grooved board, so the board and the clip have to be compatible. Some manufacturers require their own system for warranty purposes. Ungrooved boards can be edge-screwed with a jig or face screwed, but not clipped.
Yes, with three conditions: a composite-specific screw colour-matched to your board, a depth-setting attachment so every head sits at the same depth, and consistent layout. On a variegated mid-tone board, properly set screws disappear into the pattern within a few feet.
Whichever lets you control the gap. Fixed narrow clip spacing packs with fir needles and maple debris in Maple Valley and stops draining. Edge-screwed hidden systems and face screwing both let us open the gap up, which is why we lean away from clips on heavily treed lots.
Often yes, but check joist spacing first. Composite usually needs joists at 16 inches on centre or closer, and older frames built for cedar at 24 inches need additional support added before any composite goes down, regardless of fastener type.
Yes. We build composite decks across Covington, Kent, Renton and Issaquah as well, and the tree debris argument applies across most of this part of King County.
If you are gathering composite deck quotes in Maple Valley, three questions will tell you most of what you need to know about who you are dealing with.
Which specific fastener system, by name, and which areas of the deck get it? A quote that just says “hidden fasteners” is not a specification.
What gap are you setting between boards, and why that number for my lot? Anyone who has built here under trees will have an answer about debris and drainage.
What joist spacing does my chosen board require, and does my frame meet it? On a resurfacing project this question is the difference between an accurate quote and a change order.
We are happy to walk your deck or your site, show you both systems on sample boards, and give you an itemised quote that names the fastener system rather than burying it in a square-foot rate. Free on-site estimates across Maple Valley and the surrounding King and Pierce County area.
Decks Restore LLC, Washington contractor license CC DECKSRL797P2, licensed, bonded and insured.
Call (253) 677-0290 or request a free quote. Finished composite projects are in our gallery.