Deck Repair & Restoration

What we look at first

The ledger. It is the connection between your deck and your house, and it is where the serious failures start. We want to see how it is fastened, whether it is flashed, whether it is bearing on something it should not be, and whether there is a lateral load connection at all.

The code requires a deck to be positively anchored to the building for both vertical and lateral loads, and specifically prohibits doing it with toenails or nails that work in withdrawal. On decks built before that was enforced, we frequently find exactly that. We also find ledgers bolted through stucco with no flashing, and ledgers bearing on stone veneer, which the code does not allow.

The lateral connection is the one that fails without warning. It is a tension tie between the deck framing and the house framing, and when it is absent the deck can separate under load even though every board looks fine.

The 2026 flashing change, and why it matters on a repair

The 2025 code cycle added a prescriptive requirement for ledger flashing: the water-resistive barrier has to run continuous behind the ledger and lap over the vertical leg of the flashing. On an older house with no water-resistive barrier behind the siding, that means installing a new strip of one behind the ledger, running above the top of it.

Practically, this means a deck replacement done in 2026 gets a detail that essentially no deck built before it has. If your deck is coming off anyway, this is the moment that detail is free.

What we can usually save

Framing is often fine when the surface is not. Hardwood decks in particular go grey and rough long before they go structurally bad, and a sand and re-oil brings them back for a fraction of a replacement.

We replace individual boards, sister or replace damaged joists, re-flash ledgers, add lateral connections, rebuild stairs, and swap failed railings without touching the deck field. Where posts have rotted at the base we replace them and set them properly — the code wants either an approved connector or twelve inches of embedment for lateral restraint, and a post sitting on a paver has neither.

What is not worth saving

If the framing is undersized for the current load requirements, if the ledger has been leaking long enough to get into the rim joist and the wall behind it, or if the deck is over living space and the waterproofing has failed, you are usually better off rebuilding. We will tell you that plainly rather than selling you a repair that buys eighteen months.

Old redwood decks with heavy checking, decks built without permits to no particular standard, and decks where every fastener is corroded through are the common cases.

Refinishing

For hardwood: sand, clean, and oil, or let it go silver. Both are fine. Oil is a maintenance commitment, not a one-time fix.

For composite and PVC: these do not refinish. They clean. If a composite deck is chalking or the cap has worn through, that is a replacement conversation, not a restoration one.

Getting an honest answer

We are a deck company, not a demolition company. If a repair will do the job we will say so — we have been doing this in Los Angeles since 1995 and the referrals are worth more than the difference.

Call (818) 345-2866.