Deck Refinishing in Fairfax, VA

The frame houses near Van Dyck Park, along Old Lee Highway and over toward Daniels Run have deep front porches rather than back decks. People call them decks. They behave nothing alike.

A porch floor is usually tongue and groove fir or pine, laid tight, pitched slightly away from the house and sitting under a roof. Water cannot drain between the boards because there are no gaps, and the roof keeps direct sun off. So the failure mode is the joints: moisture gets into the tongue, the board swells, and the floor lifts along a seam.

These want a floor-rated porch enamel or a penetrating oil depending on what is already on them. Column bases are the other thing we check. They sit on masonry that stays damp and rot from the bottom up while the top eight feet look perfect. We do that carpentry ourselves.

Mosby Woods, Country Club Hills, Cobbdale, Fairchester Woods, Westmore and Little River Hills are the postwar wave, and those back gardens are mature now. Nearly every colonial and split-level in them picked up a pressure-treated pine deck somewhere in the eighties or nineties.

Two faults repeat. The grading on a lot of these lots pushes water back at the house, which is the same reason the painted foundation course peels, and it is why the stair stringers rot at the bottom where they land on a wet patio or bare ground. And the deck was usually built low, off a walkout or a back door near grade, so the underside never dries and the boards take on water from below the whole time.

We sound the stringer bases and the posts at grade before quoting any finish. Three good coats of stain on rotten stringers is still a rotten deck.

George Mason sits hard against the southern side of the city, and a good share of the housing there is student and graduate rental. Those decks take heavy traffic and they come with a fixed date.

A turnover is the gap between one lease ending and the next starting. Deck work is weather-dependent in a way that painting a bedroom is not. Tell us the date at the estimate and we will say honestly whether the wash, the drying and the stain fit inside it. Sometimes they do not, and the sensible answer is carpentry and splinter sanding now, finish after move-in.

On rentals we steer away from solid stain. It looks uniform the first week and it peels under that much foot traffic, and a peeling film on a walking surface is a phone call every spring. A semi-transparent wears thin instead of letting go in sheets.

North-facing boards under a mature oak in these back gardens grow an algae film that is slick underfoot and hides whatever the wood is doing beneath it.

We wash at controlled pressure with a wood cleaner and give it dwell time, then brighten to bring the pH back and restore the tone. High pressure on softened pine cuts furrows into the grain that telegraph through every coat afterwards. The brightener is the step homeowners skip, and skipping it is the usual reason a deck goes blotchy.

Then we wait. Dry means dry through the board, which in a shaded Fairfax garden in July is commonly two days. We stain when the wood is ready rather than when the calendar says so.

If a quarter of the field boards are soft, a finish is money spent on a symptom. We will say so. Replacing decking on sound framing is a smaller job than most people expect, and our own crew does that carpentry rather than sending you off to find a second trade.

We also will not stain composite. It is not made to take a finish. Composite gets cleaned at low pressure and left there.

Fredy Vargas walks every deck himself before pricing it. Whether yours is a wash and stain or a full strip and restore is not a judgement anyone can make from a photograph, and the two are not close in price. Virginia contractor license 2705098145, licensed, bonded and insured. Ten percent off for veterans and for anyone 65 or over. Call 703-869-0593.