Deck Refinishing in Arlington, VA

Ashton Heights was platted in 1921, Maywood is older still, and Lyon Village, Cherrydale and Waverly Hills run to the same era. The front porch on those houses is a tongue and groove floor, not decking, and it needs the opposite approach.

There are no gaps between the boards, so water that blows in sideways sits in the joints instead of draining through. A penetrating deck stain has nothing to penetrate into on a floor like that and no way to shed the water. Those floors take a porch and floor enamel, over a fully dry substrate, with the end grain sealed where the boards run into the edge trim.

The failures are always in the same places: the outer two board courses that catch the rain, and the bottom step, which sits on wet brick or concrete. We replace those in kind rather than filling them.

Across Arlington Forest, Bluemont, Westover and the 22205 and 22207 streets, the postwar capes and ramblers came with wrought iron: porch supports, stoop rails, step rails and basement window grilles. On a deck and porch job that ironwork is half the work and it is the part most often skipped.

Iron rusts outward from the inside of a joint, so the weld and the base plate fail before the middle of a rail does. Painting over live rust hides it for a season and nothing more. We take the loose scale back to sound metal, prime with a rust-inhibitive or rust-converting primer and then topcoat, and we pay particular attention to the base where the post meets wet concrete.

Where iron rail meets a wood porch floor, we do the metal first and the floor after. Doing it the other way round means grinding dust and rust flakes landing on a fresh floor finish.

A large share of Arlington households are in attached or multi-family housing: the 1940s garden apartment complexes around Westover, the towers through Ballston, Clarendon, Rosslyn and Pentagon City, and converted condominium units all over the county.

If you have a balcony or a small terrace, the building usually controls its appearance and sometimes owns the surface. Check before you book. What we can do easily is provide a certificate of insurance to the management company, work inside permitted hours, reserve the service elevator when it is required, and protect corridors and lobby floors coming in and out.

In Fairlington and similar older attached communities the association typically sets exterior standards, and on decks that often lands on a specified solid stain. We will match whatever the standard names.

The teardown and rebuild houses going up across north Arlington often come with Ipe, Cumaru or Garapa decking, and it does not behave like the pine on the house it replaced.

These woods are dense enough to sink in water and oily enough to reject ordinary deck products. What we get called to fix is a film-forming stain someone put on it, which never penetrated and is now peeling off in sheets, or an oil applied over an unwashed deck that sealed mildew under the finish. Both are stripping jobs before they are refinishing jobs, and we say so before quoting.

Done properly it is clean, brighten, dry through, then a hardwood penetrating oil worked in thin with the excess wiped off. Excess oil left standing on Ipe stays tacky and collects dirt for months.

Arlington has both National Register districts and local historic districts and they are not the same. A National Register listing, which covers Ashton Heights, Westover and others, is largely honorific and does not control what you do with your deck.

A local district, Maywood being the best known, does involve county review through a certificate of appropriateness for exterior changes. The useful part is that Arlington County lists paint colors among the exceptions to that requirement, along with routine maintenance and repair in the same materials. Restaining an existing deck is generally not the obstacle people assume. Replacing materials with something different is a separate question, so if you are swapping wood decking for composite, ask county staff first.

Fredy Vargas walks the deck before quoting either way. Call 703-869-0593.