My Deck Is Sinking!

Power washing our Big Red Deck for a season of grilling and chilling and I noticed that it's sinking.  Sinking at the house. Which is unusual. Most decks that I've seen sink do so either in the middle or at the front or on one end.

 

Obviously, the footings are settling. Hopefully just the footings that are holding up this middle section of the deck. I have to get in there to see what's going on with the joist hangers. Are there any? Are they failing? Is the sill plate moving? Tough to tell from these pictures just how steep the incline back to the house is. Whoops, the dog just rolled over without trying.

Come to think of it, last winter I had noticed an inordinate amount of "ponding" on the deck after it rains. I just shrugged it off. Sort of like when you go to the doctor and he gives you a grim diagnosis. You had noticed all along their was blood in your urine but you just thought it was something you ate. "It'll pass", he said.  

I spoke to a deck guy who also thought it odd the deck is sinking at the house. Here we can see the worst point of the sinking; we're down about an inch or so. Doesn't sound like a lot but you really notice the incline when you walk across the deck from one of the two sides that flank the middle.



This is a beautiful deck when its freshly stained. We had a deck in Connecticut that was "stained" white. White next to a brown house. Beautiful when the paint or stain is is fresh; not so much when it gets a little old. Yeah. "Little old". Like a week into it. Decks are a maintenance headache. I'm an engineer at heart. I build. I don't maintain. This coat of stain is just two years old. It started looking like crap last summer. Someone say, "Trex?"

 

My plan this weekend is to pull up enough boards to be able to make some sort of diagnosis. These are hard to get up, though. If I can get any traction on the screws, most times I snap off the heads. Lovely. There's also plenty of nails in this thing. Poor thing was not taken care of it seems and when it was it was hatcheted. We're the third owners of this house that was built in 1998. The people we bought the house from were divorcing. Note to self, don't buy a house from folks who are splitting up. They don't keep up their assets.

Good news is I had been planning on adding lighting to the deck and that would require me to pop up a number of boards to gain access underneath. Bad news is, this project might be a lot more than I had bargained for. Cheers.