Friday, December 15, 2023

Fixin' The Deck Part 7

The last post ended with the progress we made over the Thanksgiving vacation. After that we had a few days of rain, and a few days of being busy, but the following weekend was dry, so I got back to work. I began by removing all the temporary boards....


And piling them on the remaining part of the roof:


Then it was back to installing the final shims...


...and adding blocking in the places where posts will be located:


The next post location was damaged, so I took a break from shimming to deal with that.


Damaged sections removed:


The joists are Laminated Veneer Lumber (LVL) which means they are straight, strong, resist warping and shrinking and are the reason the roof doesn't sag in the middle even though there is no central support. This also means they are 1 7/8" wide, and so cannot be patched with standard lumber which is only 1 1/2". The replacement piece was instead milled from a scrap of 4" x 4" in just a few minutes thanks to the gear we have in the workshop.


Installed and adjacent blocking added:


The damage where the corner post used to be is much worse:


The beam which spans the front of the garage above the vehicle door consists of three (3) LVL beams and a 3/4" piece of plywood which have been connected with nails and wrapped with steel banding (below). In front of this is another piece of plywood which acts as a spacer, and a redwood fascia board.


At the far end all of the plywood has been rotted out and the two (2) outer LVLs have been badly damaged; the third LVL was less significantly damaged:


I did not have time to do any repairs to this area since it was getting late, and it was due to rain overnight. Instead, I re-installed the boards, again with just a couple of screws each...


...and rolled back the roof and plywood one more time:


The next evening there was a torrent of water flowing through the garage ceiling:

This was way worse than anything we've had in the past, which does not bode well...


By Friday the blue sky was back:


After I got back from work, I peeled back the old roof covering, and discovered one source of water intrusion:


As I began removing the temporary boards, I noticed that the channels were filled with water: 


The design of the deck boards calls for a one percent slope, which equates to 1/8" per foot. But, in the places which have not been shimmed out, there is no such slope. In fact, there are low points where the channels in the boards fill with water and then...overflow! 


Where temporary boards were installed with the correct slope there was no water in the channels. Which means the deck boards/roofing material works as it should when installed correctly. The lesson from this is that the roof/deck must be covered with correctly sloped boards OR plywood/the old roof before the next rainfall. 

There wasn't much daylight left at this point, but I did have time to take out one more section of the railing and push over another post:

The lag bolt at the base of the post is heavily corroded:


This is the plywood around where the post was located, which doesn't look very promising:


To be continued.....

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