Sledgstone

I want to strangle the person and/or people who installed the deck at my house. They did everything wrong. x_x I think two more weekends of work and another $100 more in wood and hardware and I'll be done fixing its supports for this winter. They installed the deck right to the concrete blocks that act as a skirt around the house. These blocks do not provide any structural benefit to the house, its just a wall for the crawl space.. but these blocks are just stacked on each other and stucco'd so it all looks like a normal basement wall.. well the deck settled over the years and caused the back wall to start collapsing.

These idiots didn't connect the deck hardware correctly and they had the far support beam that all the joists are connected to attached to those blocks.. Because the hardware wasn't secured the board bowed outwards into those blocks causing them to shift.. the weight of those blocks pulled on the board more and the issue compounded itself. So could I just jack up that board? Nope.. because I had to reinforce the corners and connect all the joists to that board first or the entire back of the deck would collapse. And its a big deck, 1,000+ pounds of wood. I fixed the corner, added support pieces, disconnected the concrete blocks from the wood, used these beefy ass clamps that I bought from Lowes to pull the board back into place and secure it to the joists with structural exterior screws.. and now I have to add 3 new 4x4 supports to distribute the weight away from that wall. Pain in my ass. I'm glad I have my 3 ton jack from when I used to do car work. That jack can lift any part of this deck no problem which has been very helpful during these repairs.

Turns out that entire back beam was being secured to all the rest of the wood of the deck with only 10 nails and 4 screws. I can understand cutting corners to save money, but holy f*ck that was dangerous. And deck hardware is expensive as hell. I've dropped $100 easy on 4 boxes of different screws, nails and structural screws. Those structural screws are just over $1 a piece. It all adds up quick. After last weekend that board and the corner its attached to is now connected with 40 additional screws and 14 structural screws. Thats no even counting all the extra nails I put in on the corresponding opposite ends of all the joists. Each joist hanger is supposed to have 8 nails, four 1 1/2 nails and four 3 inch nails. These jack asses used 2 small nails for each joist hanger and literally set all the joists in them without connecting them.. all that weight just free floating. The only thing keeping them all in place was the deck boards we walk on on the top.. of course all of those deck boards were only connected with 4 screws each instead of 8 or 12 depending on the length of the boards. So when I was doing all the work, I had to leave those top deck boards in place to keep everything together while I crawled under there, only a 2 foot clearance, and did all that work. wtf.