Deck Refinishing in Alexandria, VA

A good share of what gets called deck work in Del Ray and Rosemont is porch work. Del Ray was platted from 1894 as a streetcar suburb, and the front porch on those bungalows and four squares is tongue and groove running front to back, with wood steps and a beadboard ceiling over it.

Tongue and groove cannot be finished like decking. The boards are tight to each other with no drainage gap, so rain that blows in sideways sits in the joints instead of running through. A penetrating deck stain is the wrong product on that floor. It wants a porch and floor enamel, worked into the end grain where the boards die into the edge trim, laid on a floor that is dry underneath and not just on the face.

While the furniture is off we look at the parts that fail before the floor does: rafter tails, which are end grain pointing at the sky, and tapered column bases on brick piers that stay wet at the bottom while the top of the column looks perfect.

The blocks near the Potomac and the low ground through Old Town North hold morning damp for hours after the higher streets around Seminary Hill have dried. We have started at eight on one street and found the low end still wet while the top end was ready to coat.

So we do not book an Alexandria deck by the calendar alone. We wash, we wait, and we meter the boards rather than judging by thumb. In a humid stretch a deck three blocks off the water can want a full extra day over the same deck out on the West End. We take the day.

Dew runs the same way in the evening. Down near the river we stop earlier in the afternoon so an oil has time to set before the damp comes back up off the ground.

Hollin Hills is roughly 450 Charles Goodman houses built between 1949 and 1971 on wooded lots of a third of an acre and up, with flat roofs, wide glazing and wood siding. The decks and terraces there are part of the design rather than bolted on later. Fairfax County approved a historic overlay district in 2022, so exterior modifications go before the county architectural review board, and the community has run its own design review committee for decades.

Refinishing one is slow, careful work for a specific reason: the deck usually meets a full-height wall of glass, and every cut line is on display from inside the room with no trim to hide it. Spraying anything against that much glazing is out. It is brush and pad work along the house.

The wooded lots put most of these decks in shade, so expect longer drying and soft surface fiber near the downspouts. Ask your review committee before changing a color or a material.

Kingstowne is a planned community from the late eighties and nineties, mostly townhouse rows, and the association has a position on your exterior. Fairlington and Parkfairfax are National Register districts, which is recognition rather than permit control, but the condominium and townhouse associations there set binding exterior standards of their own.

On a townhouse deck that normally shows up as a solid stain in a specified shade. Solid stain does cover a tired deck well and if the standard calls for it we use it. What we will tell you is what you are signing up for. It is a film on a surface people walk on and water sits on, so it eventually peels in sheets rather than wearing thin, and going back to a semi-transparent later is a strip rather than a recoat. Better to know that now than in year four.

A deck raised over a brick courtyard usually has poor airflow underneath, and boards taking on moisture from below the whole time will not hold a finish however good the product is. If that is what we find, we say so rather than selling you a coat that fails on schedule.

On an older city property we also sound the ledger, the board that ties the deck to the house. On a brick rowhouse that connection runs into masonry, and a bolt working loose in soft old brick is a structural question, not a finishing one. That is a deck builder before it is a painter.

Fredy Vargas walks every deck himself before quoting it. A wash and stain and a full strip and restore are not close in price, and nobody can tell which one you need from a photograph. Call 703-869-0593.