SiLOSSiLOS

Check your deck's ledger board before anything else

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1The short version

Everyone treats a deck like furniture until the day it isn't. It's a real structure, built to carry the weight of people, snow loads and objects, and to resist the lateral and uplift loads wind and seismic activity put on it. InterNACHI's estimate that only about 40 percent of the roughly 45 million existing decks in North America are completely safe is not a scare number, it's the state of decks built before current codes, or built by hand without an inspection.

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2What goes wrong

Rail failure happens far more often than a total deck collapse, and it happens exactly where people put their weight without thinking: leaning to take a photo, kids climbing on the balusters. There's no international tracking system for deck failures, so most municipalities never formally investigate a given failure's cause, which means the same mistakes get repeated deck to deck.

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3The two or three ways people actually check

A homeowner does the three-point check on this page's tool: ledger, rail, boards, a few minutes each spring. A more thorough owner also checks post connections and joist hangers from underneath. Anyone selling or buying a house with a deck gets a professional inspection as part of the sale, which is the only version that actually opens up connections a visual check from above can't see.

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