On 5 Dec 2006 07:40:44 -0800, "
wrote:

I moved in to a house with a badly built deck. They used 5/4" treated
wood, but it's warping and bowing all over the place. There's 3/4" gap
in some places.

Most decks are boring, and are only made interesting, if at all, by
the furniture and the people.

Your deck is already interesting. Now if you had gaps of 6 or 8
inches, it would be downright exciting**.

If you want to use nails, use spiral nails. They twist as you nail
them in, but the whole deck and house has to twist for them to pop
out.

I'm pretty sure my railings and posts and even the joists weren't
treated, but the horizontal deck boards must have been. They were fine
for 10 or 15 years, when I tried to seal them, but at 25 years they
started to bend and pull their nails out of the joists, maybe because
the joists were rotting. (I was going to use gutter screws to
reattach the deck boards, but there was nothing left to screw them
into.)

In my defense I intended to redo the whole deck this past spring, but
I was fat, out of shape, and depressed.

I have big plans for next spring and plan to seek advice here soon.

**Remove every third or fourth deck board and you can make your
current deck as exciting as the railroad train bridge I was walking on
this summer. Every once in a while a tie was missing, and it really
got my adrenalin going.

Is it a good idea to pull the top boards up, run them through a surface
planer, put sealer on them and then use them again, or are they
garbage?

Also, I don't know why they started to warp as they are treated wood
and they have three screws per joist placed around 16" apart. The
wood was never sealed though, maybe that's it? It's only two-three
years old according to the neighbors and has been in this bad of shape
since I moved in about 18 months ago.