Deck project done wrong!

[chim]

...........When building a deck, I make sure that every step is exactly the same height. ..............

Two places near me had variations that made it seem like each step was built by a different crew without talking to each other. One was a set of concrete steps at a Catholic church parking lot and the other was access to the basement level range at a gun club. Both have been replaced.

 

[scootr]

How are the steps attached to the deck?

Barely. New stair stringers are needed. All steps to be even or somebody's gonna take a fall one day. Bought a house once with stairs of different length/height. What a nightmare trying to remember where the big or small step was.
Also agree they need to pour a bigger pad or use a 12x12 concrete stepping pad under the base.
7 inches is the accepted rise for any step. That side step is too high and real trip hazard where it meets the stair

 

[HawkinsHollow]

At first glance it looks like a solid build and someone without a lot of knowledge about building such things would overlook the mistakes. I think shoddy or new "carpenters" take advantage of the lack of knowledge of your average homeowner. It is not until something fails or they trip over that 1 step 10 times do they realize they have been screwed.

 

[EddieWalker]

I think you're right. I see a lot of deck projects on my FB page. Mostly from home owners that are very proud of what they have built, but clueless on how bad it is.

Then there are the guys who are starting out as contractors, who have worked for other contractors, and they are sharing their projects on FB to get more work. They think they are showing quality work, and a bunch of their close friends compliment them on how good the deck looks, but it's really very poorly done.

The struggle is saying something, or just ignoring it. I have the same struggle on here when I see something being done poorly. If it's somebody that is being paid to do it, I usually say something. If it's a member on here, I try not to be rude, and be more subtle in suggesting ways to do it differently.

One of the reasons I like this site so much is from all the times I've posted projects on here, and people that know more then me, have commented on what I'm doing. They mentions ways that I could do it better. Sometimes it was subtle, other times they where blunt. Every time, I consider what they say and almost always, do as suggested.

 

[chim]

I think you're right. I see a lot of deck projects on my FB page. Mostly from home owners that are very proud of what they have built, but clueless on how bad it is..........

When #3 Son was looking for a house he asked me to come along. After seeing several that had owner-performed work, I asked the realtor if he could find us a house that the owner didn't "improve".

We had seen all sorts of things like a large deck with a couple support posts that didn't quite touch the ground, a bilevel with a garage added on the end where the only access between the house and garage was a stair that resembled a ship's ladder to the garage's second story then a narrow passage to the house's kitchen, all sorts of homebrew plumbing and electrical, etc.

 

[California]

We had seen all sorts of things ...

Tell me bout it!

This old farmhouse was owner-built, and much later wired, before codes and inspections. The biggest tell that it is primitive, is that you see exterior siding if you are in the bathroom and look toward the wall that separates it from kitchen. Ie, the first add-on was indoor plumbing.

Grandpa didn't do much to it when he bought the place in 1950. Dad and I (as a little kid) replaced the mud-sill foundation (redwood planks on the ground, rotted) with piers and posts a few years later. I'll skip more similar stories but Dad's advice for when I eventually inherited it, was to tear down and build new, you can't repair stuff as fast as it is disintegrating. But I chose to maintain it instead. This isn't our principal home, we only spend half our time here.

Now, I'm just patching stuff and and giving the same tear-down advice to the next generation.

I saw the online photo of that goofy new deck after I finished repairing the deck stairs here last week. That photo made me think how non-standard design here has made repairs more complicated.

Below is a photo.

The outer edge of the first stair tread crumbled away if you stood right at the edge. And the stair rail post at the bottom stair had rotted, this explained why it didn't feel solid even after I ran an additional bolt through it recently.

Replacing the lower stair tread, I found the redwood stair stringers rested on brick pavers, but gopher dirt had buried the contact point so all the stringers were rotten along their lower edges.

I had some old full-dimension 2x12 first-growth redwood plank scraps, and made partial scab stair stringers to bear down properly on the pavers and support the stair stringers. My air framing nailer was invaluable for attaching these alongside the stringers since there was no room to swing a hammer, or drill for bolts, in the now-narrow space between stringers. I also replaced the 4x4 newell post. This bolted securely to the adjacent reinforced stair stringer and went all the way down to bear on the paver beneath. The railing now doesn't feel shaky.

With new redwood for the lowest stair tread these stairs are good as new .