PLEASE NOTE: This following was excerpted from the Monday Morning Marketer, a newsletter specifically written for Home Inspectors.

I don't know how it is in your part of the world, but here in northern Utah wooden decks are installed on about 50% of the homes that I inspect. Two decks that I inspected recently made me stop and do some rethinking on the topic. I have always made the assumption that if a deck was built with a "Permit" that there were strict "Building Codes" dictating their design, but I was wrong.

Wood decks are often built by the General Contractor during the original home's construction, but in most cases, they are erected after the original construction. In Utah, many are constructed by Harvey Homeowner himself after watching informative TV programs like Hometime or good old Bob Vilas. If Harvey didn't do the after-construction deck work, then it was a low budget contractor who had to cut every imaginable corner to make any profit. Either way, construction and layout techniques vary greatly. The greatest sacrifice is the overall deck safety..

As a Home Inspector I was trained to evaluate deck supports, deck boards and railing systems. However there is a lot more to decks than I originally realized. Failure of deck structure without proper Home Inspector documentation would leave the HI in serious financial and legal trouble. Let's revisit the topic of wood decks from a different perspective so that we can better protect our clients.

CONTINUE READING “THE MOUNTAIN CABIN DECK”