Customer Service: (253) 677-0290
Customer Service: (253) 677-0290
By Daniel Rotaru, Owner and CEO at Decks Restore. WA Contractor License # CC DECKSRL797P2. Tacoma, WA.
Almost every call about an aging deck opens the same way. “Can this be saved?”
It is the wrong question. Nearly any deck can be saved if you spend enough. The useful question is whether saving it is a better use of your money than replacing it, and that comes down to three things I check before I give anyone a number.
I am going to walk through them in the order I actually use them, because the order matters. If the first answer is bad, the other two stop mattering.
The boards you walk on are the part you can see, and they are almost never the part that decides this.
Wood decking in our climate wears out on a schedule. The structure underneath usually outlasts it, with two exceptions that I look for before anything else.
The first is the ledger, the board bolted to your house that carries one edge of the deck. If it was installed without proper flashing, water has been running behind it for years, and the damage is not on the deck. It is in your rim joist and your sheathing. That is a house problem wearing a deck costume, and I have written about how far that spreads in when an old deck becomes a whole house problem.
The second is where the posts meet the ground. A post set directly on or into concrete with no standoff wicks moisture up into the end grain and rots from the bottom, invisibly, while the top eighteen inches look perfect.
If either of those is failing, you are not resurfacing. You are rebuilding, or at minimum doing structural work that costs more than most people expect. If both are sound and the joists are solid, you have options.
This is the question people skip, and skipping it is expensive.
Resurfacing keeps the existing structure. That means it also keeps the existing size, the existing shape, the existing height, the existing stair location, and the existing door you step out of. You are paying to preserve every decision somebody made about this deck decades ago, including the ones that were wrong.
So before you spend anything, stand on it and be honest. Is it big enough for how you use it now? Are the stairs where you want them, or do you walk around the long way every time? Is the grill in the only spot that fits rather than the spot that makes sense? Does the railing block the view you actually have?
If the answers are fine, resurfacing is good value. If you have been living with a compromise for ten years, resurfacing locks that compromise in for another twenty, and a rebuild starts looking cheaper than it sounds.
Match the spend to the horizon.
If you are selling within a year or two, targeted repair that makes the deck safe and presentable is usually the right call. A buyer’s inspector will flag loose railings, soft boards, and missing joist hangers, and fixing those is far cheaper than a rebuild you will not enjoy.
If you are staying ten or twenty years, the arithmetic flips. Composite over a sound frame stops the maintenance cycle. A full rebuild resets the clock on everything including the parts nobody thinks about until they fail.
The trap is spending rebuild money on a two year horizon, or spending repair money on a twenty year one and doing it all again in five.
Contractors use them loosely, which is a large part of why quotes are hard to compare.
Repair means replacing failed components while the structure stays. Some boards, a few joists, a railing section, stair treads, flashing. The deck keeps its shape and its bones.
Resurface means keeping the substructure and replacing the walking surface, almost always with new railing at the same time. Same frame, same footprint, new everything you touch. This is what most people mean when they say they want composite on their old deck, and it is the core of our deck resurfacing work.
Rebuild means the frame comes out. Sometimes the footings stay if they are adequate and correctly placed. Often they do not, because footing requirements have changed and because a new layout puts the loads somewhere else.
Joist spacing.
A lot of older decks were framed at twenty four inches on center, which was fine for the two by six cedar that went on top. Most composite decking is not rated for that span. It needs sixteen inches on center for a standard straight layout, and tighter than that for a diagonal pattern, because a forty five degree run increases the effective span between supports.
So a resurfacing quote on a twenty four inch frame includes adding joists or sistering the existing ones. That is real labor, and it is why one contractor says a number and another says something much higher for what sounds like the same job. Composite is also heavier than the cedar it replaces, which is a second reason the frame gets scrutinized rather than assumed.
When you get resurfacing quotes, ask what the joist spacing is and what the quote assumes about it. If nobody has been under the deck with a tape measure, the number is a guess.
Material choice matters here too, since the boards you pick determine the span requirements you have to meet. I compared how the major brands have held up locally in Trex versus TimberTech versus Fiberon on real Puget Sound decks.
Repair costs least. Resurfacing costs more. Rebuilding costs most. That part is obvious and not very useful.
What is useful is knowing where the lines blur. Once a resurfacing job includes adding joists, replacing posts, redoing the ledger, and bringing the guardrail up to current height and spacing, it has crept most of the way toward the cost of a rebuild. At that point you are paying nearly rebuild money to keep a footprint you may not even like.
That is the moment to go back to question two. If the layout is right, finish the resurface. If it is not, the extra step to a full rebuild buys you the deck you actually wanted, and the incremental cost is much smaller than it looks from the outside.
The first is resurfacing over a frame that should have come out. New composite on a rotting substructure looks excellent for about four years, and then you are paying twice, because pulling good boards off a bad frame wastes most of what you spent.
The second is rebuilding a frame that was fine. This happens when the assessment is done by someone selling a rebuild. A pressure treated frame that was flashed correctly and kept off the ground can have a lot of life left in it, and there is no reason to throw that away because the surface wore out on schedule. Wood decking has a shorter service life than the structure under it, which I went into in the lifespan of a wood deck in Tacoma.
Both mistakes come from the same place: somebody decided without getting underneath.
The assessment is not complicated, but it has to be done physically rather than from the yard.
We check the ledger connection and whether flashing exists. We look at every post where it meets concrete or soil. We check joist hanger fasteners, because roofing nails in joist hangers are common and wrong. We measure joist spacing and span. We look at footing size and condition where we can see it. We check guard height and baluster spacing against current requirements, and stair rise consistency, because those are the two things that fail an inspection and the two things most likely to hurt somebody.
If you want to do a first pass before calling anyone, our seven point inspection checklist covers what you can assess yourself. The parts you cannot assess yourself are the ledger and the footings, which is unfortunately where the answer usually lives.
A rebuild is permitted work. Whether a resurface needs a permit depends on whether the job touches structure, and once you are adding joists or replacing posts, it usually does. Cosmetic board replacement generally does not.
This is worth settling early rather than late, because it changes the schedule more than the budget. The general process is covered in permits and regulations for deck construction in Tacoma, and requirements differ across the South Sound, so confirm with the jurisdiction your address actually sits in.
A repair versus rebuild opinion is worth exactly as much as the person giving it, and it is an opinion with a financial interest attached. Mine included.
Before you act on anybody’s assessment, look them up. Washington’s Department of Labor and Industries has a free tool to verify a contractor, tradesperson, or business where you can confirm an active registration, check the bond and insurance, and see whether there are safety citations or lawsuits against the bond. It takes two minutes and it is the single best filter available to a homeowner.
Get two assessments. If they disagree, ask each one to show you the specific thing they are basing it on, underneath the deck, in person.
Can I put composite over my existing wood deck frame? Only if the frame is sound and the joist spacing meets the span requirement for the decking you choose. Twenty four inch spacing usually needs additional joists first.
Is resurfacing worth it, or should I just rebuild? Resurfacing is good value when the structure is sound and the footprint is right. When either of those fails, the gap to a full rebuild is smaller than most people assume.
How do I know if my deck frame is rotten? The two places to look are the ledger where the deck meets the house and the base of each post. Both hide damage well, and both need to be inspected from underneath rather than from above.
Does a new deck add value to my home? It affects marketability more reliably than it returns its full cost. If you are selling soon, repair to safe and presentable rather than rebuilding for a buyer.
How long does each option take? Repair is usually days. Resurfacing is typically about a week depending on size and whether joists are added. A rebuild takes longer and includes inspection holds that a resurface may not.
Decks Restore is a deck builder and resurfacing specialist in Federal Way and Tacoma, and we quote all three options rather than steering toward the biggest one. We work across the North End, Proctor, Stadium District, Old Town, Browns Point, and out through Puyallup, Gig Harbor, Kent, and Auburn.
If you want an honest read on which category your deck falls into, request a free quote. I will get under it, measure the spacing, look at the ledger, and tell you which of the three I would do on my own house. If it is a rebuild, we handle new decks as well.
Decks Restore Tacoma office: 748 Market St #173, Tacoma, WA 98402 Federal Way office: 33530 1st Way S Suite 102, Federal Way, WA 98003 Phone: (253) 677-0290 Hours: Monday to Friday 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Saturday 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM, closed Sunday WA Contractor License # CC DECKSRL797P2 Serving Tacoma, Federal Way, Gig Harbor, Puyallup, Kent, Auburn, Covington, Bonney Lake, and the surrounding South Sound.
More on our process and recent local projects on our page for deck builders in Tacoma.