Home | Home Improvement Tips | Demolishing a Wood Deck
Have you started planning a new deck, but still have your old one standing? Thankfully, demolishing a wood deck is a lot more fun then building one. Bonus, you can do it yourself! Nailed on decking is easier to remove than screwed on deck boards, but the right leveraging tool takes care of both. The demolition tools used to tear a deck down can be found at most hardware or home improvement stores. The tools you need are:
- Leather gloves
- Safety glasses
- Sledgehammer
- Pickaxe
- Reciprocating saw
- Wheelbarrow
Here are steps to demolishing a wood deck with no problems!
- Put on work gloves and safety glasses, and swing a sledgehammer into the handrails to topple them off the deck. Strike all spindles to break them off.
- Stick the flat edge of the pickaxe under the spindle baseboard and pry it up out of the underlying deck boards. You may need to stick and pry in several places. Swing and stick it under the board whenever a nail or screw holds it down. Pull on the handle of the pickaxe to pry it up.
- Pry up the outmost deck boards from the underlying floor joists with the pickaxe the same way the spindle board was pried up. Pry up and remove one deck board at a time until all deck boards have been lifted and removed. Work from the outside of the deck inward.
- Strike the ends of the floor joists where they are fastened to the hangers with the sledgehammer to bust them loose. If the sledgehammer isn’t doing the job then cut the joists off with a reciprocating saw at both ends.
- Pry the hanger boards away from the foundation with the pickaxe if the deck was attached to a foundation. Bust all the outer hanger boards off the deck support posts with the sledgehammer. Remove the hanger boards from the area.
- Dig around the concreter footings with a shovel and pull back and forth on the deck support posts until they can be pulled out of the ground. Load the footings into a wheelbarrow and haul them off.
Thank you to eHow for the original article.
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