"Deck repair" covers three different jobs, and the price moves a lot between them. A sand and re-oil on a sound deck is the cheap end, often a few hundred dollars. Swap some boards and it climbs from there. Get into the frame, the posts, the bearers, a balustrade that's come loose, and a repair can start closing in on what a good chunk of a new deck costs. Knowing which one you're being quoted for is most of what stops the sticker shock.
What decides which repair job you've got
The surface tells you almost nothing. A grey, tired-looking deck can be a re-oil away from fine, and a deck that looks alright from the top can have a post rotting at the base where nobody's looked in years.
What actually decides it is the frame underneath: the bearers, joists and posts, and specifically what's happening where the posts meet the ground. If that structure is sound, you're in repair territory no matter how bad the top looks. If it's not, no amount of new boards fixes the real problem, and that's a rebuild rather than a repair. Restoring or replacing a deck walks through how to check that yourself with a screwdriver and five minutes under the deck.
The three repair jobs, and what each costs
A sand and re-oil. This is the job when the frame's sound and the boards are just tired: greyed off, a bit of surface checking, nothing structural. Clean it back, sand it, a couple of coats of decking oil, and it comes up looking close to new. This is the cheap end of the ladder, often a few hundred dollars depending on the size of the deck, and it's a day's work rather than a week's.
A board swap or full re-board. Somewhere between a handful of rotten boards and the whole top needing replacing. A few bad boards get cut out over the joists either side and a new length spliced in, matched as close as the weathering allows, and this runs a few hundred dollars a board once labour's in it. If half the deck's cupped, split or gone soft, reboarding the whole top on the existing frame usually works out better value than chasing individual boards one at a time, and it's still a fraction of a rebuild because the expensive, slow part of the job, the frame, is already standing. What a new deck costs has the per-square-metre numbers for a full rebuild; a re-board on a sound frame comes in well under that.
Frame and balustrade work. This is where a repair starts to add up. Sistering a rotten post, swapping a soft bearer, or re-anchoring a wobbly balustrade properly is more involved than lifting boards, because the deck has to come apart to get at it and the fixings underneath usually need doing at the same time. If your deck sits more than a metre off the ground, the balustrade also has to meet the current standard, a metre high with gaps that won't let a 125mm ball through, and bringing an old rail up to that while you're in there is worth doing properly rather than just tightening what's loose.
When it stops being a repair
There's a point where "repair" is the wrong word for what's being quoted, and it's worth knowing where that line sits before you sign anything.
If more than one or two posts are rotten at the base, or the bearers have gone soft over a run of the frame rather than in one spot, you're not really repairing the deck anymore. You're replacing the structure and keeping the old boards on top, which rarely makes sense once you add it up. That's the point where a straight rebuild, priced properly by the square metre, usually costs about the same as the "repair" and leaves you with a deck that isn't a patch job. A good quote will tell you which side of that line your deck's on rather than pricing a rebuild as if it were a repair.
Getting a proper number instead of a guess
Any deck job worth more than $5,000 in labour and materials needs a licensed contractor and a written contract under NSW's home building rules, and it's worth asking for that contract even on smaller jobs. The Building Commission NSW home building contracts are free templates and a decent contractor won't mind using one. A fixed price only means something once someone's had a board up and looked at what's underneath. Anything quoted sight unseen over the phone is a guess dressed up as a number.
If you're not sure which of the three jobs above your deck needs, that's exactly what deck repairs is for. Give Dave a call on 0414 007 351 or send through the contact form and he'll come out, pull a board up, and tell you straight which repair it needs.
Want a hand with this at your place? Get a free quote or call 0414 007 351.
