Deck Refinishing in Burke, VA

Most of what we refinish here is the original deck, built with the house in the seventies or eighties out of southern yellow pine. Wood that age has settled into predictable faults:

• Deep checking along the grain on the sun-facing boards, which holds water and needs the finish worked into it rather than laid over it.
• Cupped boards holding a puddle across the middle of the deck. A finish does not flatten a cupped board. Sometimes the answer is turning it or replacing it.
• Original galvanised nails backed out proud of the surface, which will tear a pad and catch a bare foot. We reset or replace with screws before anything else happens.
• Split board ends over the beam, where end grain has wicked water for four decades.

When we replace a board we seal the cut ends before it goes down. An unsealed cut end is where the next failure starts, and on a deck this old you are not going to get another forty years out of luck alone.

In the Burke Centre clusters a great many decks are cantilevered out towards the Conservancy common land and the trail network, which puts the outer posts eight or ten feet off falling ground.

That changes the staging and the cost. The underside, the skirt, the stringers and the outer rail face all have to be reached properly rather than sprayed from below and called done, and on a slope that means built access rather than a ladder foot on a bank. We say so when we quote instead of finding it on day two.

The other consequence is drainage. Wash water and stripper residue run downhill onto common land and into the stream lines that feed Lake Accotink and Burke Lake. We contain and neutralise rather than letting it run off the back of a deck into the woods behind you, which is the right thing and also what keeps your neighbors out of the Conservancy office.

Burke sits between Burke Lake Park and the 493 acres at Lake Accotink, with mature canopy over most lots. A deck in that much shade dries slowly, and slow drying feeds green algae and black mildew on the boards.

Painting or staining over live growth just hands it a fresh surface. We wash with a mildewcidal solution, let the timber dry through rather than on the face, and use a product with mildew resistance in the film. We also point out what is keeping the deck wet: shrubs against the skirt, limbs dragging on the gutter above, and a gutter joint dripping in one line across the boards. Staining under a blocked gutter is money spent on a stripe that fails again in the same place.

On a shaded Burke deck we give you a recoat interval based on what we have seen out here rather than the best case printed on a can.

Burke empties out on a weekday. Between the VRE from Burke Centre and Rolling Road, the Fairfax County Parkway and Old Keene Mill Road heading east, most of our clients here are gone before we arrive and back after we have packed up.

That works because the crew does not change. There are four of us and Fred is on site every day, so the people in your back yard on Thursday are the ones who were there on Monday. We leave the gate secured and the site clear each evening, and we send photographs if you want to follow it from the office.

One thing to agree in advance on a deck job: the back door. If the deck is your only way out to the yard, we sequence the stairs and the landing so you are not stepping onto wet stain in the dark.

Burke is not only Burke Centre. Lake Braddock, Signal Hill, Longwood Knolls, Dunleigh, Cherry Run, Fox Lair and Edgewater have lighter rules or none, so the color is your own call. The decks are the same age and the tree cover is the same, so only the paperwork changes.

While the equipment is on site, the board fences backing onto common land, the shed, the playset and the pergola all weather the way the deck does and are cheap to do in the same visit. So is washing the driveway and the patio.

If you have Ipe or Cumaru, mention it on the phone. Brazilian hardwood is dense and oily, it will not take a conventional deck stain, and it wants a penetrating hardwood oil instead. Fredy Vargas walks every deck before quoting. Call 703-869-0593.