I’ve been meaning to get back to this thread for some time. First I’d like to thank everyone that offered advice. [thumbs up] We ended up using Trex pre-grooved decking with Tiger Claw hidden fasteners made specifically for this decking. Both the Tiger Claw clips and the screws are stainless steel. The screw heads and the clips have a black coating to help hide them. I know Markus didn’t like the screws, I didn’t have any trouble with them.
Overall the decking went down pretty fast and without much trouble. Even after bringing the framing up to code I was a little worried how flat the framing would be since there were several additions to the deck over the years. Only one spot needed a small amount of shaving with the planer. We used a boarder (decking without grooves) to hide the ends of the grooved decking. Getting started with the boarder was the hardest part since the front was broken up by a tree. We used color matched screws since there wasn’t a Cortex screw for our decking. After that everything went well for our first time using this system. The deck was about 200 sq ft, two of us got it done in a day. I think the bowrench Darcy mentioned might have helped to speed things up.
This is first time I’ve used any hidden fastener system so I can’t compare the Tiger Claw to other systems. That said, I didn’t find it to be time consuming, or harder that face screwing. In fact, the TC system would likely have been faster than face screwing.
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As for the project as a whole, it was fun but there was delay after delay. Some of the delays were our fault, most were not. The first major hurdle was figuring out the
Vergola system. Imagine an overhead venetian blind type structure in place of a pergola. As it turns out there aren’t many of these in the States, in fact the nearest one is in New Jersey. The company that doesn’t the east coast sales and installations is out Connecticut, and they knew very little about the product. After a day on the phone we finally knew what size the finished openings of the Vergola sections needed to be and a pretty good guess what type of wire we needed and where the it had to go. Yes, we were guessing (albeit and educated one) on a $40,000 deck project. It gets better. The house is a duplex, each half is owned independently. Both sides have decks that butt up to one another (separated but a poorly attached fence when we got to the job). The guy next door was selling his place so he had a survey done to establish the property line. Well he didn’t bother to tell our client that his deck was a foot over the line onto our client’s property. Not a big problem except we needed to build proper privacy fence and there simply was room to get fence posts between the decks. After some careful negotiation we came to an agreement we’d remove offending framing and decking to do the work needed for the fence. If only it was that simple….
After removing some of the decking it was abundantly clear it wasn’t going to be as simple as were hoping. This guy’s deck was falling apart because it was so poorly build. The ledger board was falling off the house, 2x6x12’ joists were spaced 30” and I’m not kidding, they weren’t even attached on one end! [scared] How this thing didn’t collapse is beyond me. We gave the guy a bid to rebuild his deck right but he wasn’t interested. We couldn’t touch it if it wasn’t going to meet code, so we were stopped dead in our tracks again.
After some more careful negotiation the guy had his landscaper move the framing out our way. Great, we were moving forward again, at least for a little while. We stood up 6x8 posts for the framing for the Vergola and installed the decking. But we had to wait for the Simpson brackets to continue with the upper framing. So we left the job for a week, sadly this wasn’t the only time we had to leave the job because of scheduling conflicts. I’m glad all jobs don’t put up a fight like this one and thank goodness the client is super mellow!
Okay, enough of the sob story, we finished our end early last week. The Vergola system will be installed later this month.
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We used a Trex railing, it was super easy to install but it does look a little plasticy.
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Here's a shot of the upper framing for the Vergola, parallam wrapped in Azek trimmed with staff molding.
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Molding around the tops of the post, Azek rake molding.
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There are lights everywhere, I used the MFS and 1400 to make quick work of cutting out for the boxes in the Azek.
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Here's one of the light in place in a riser board on the stairs.
I’ll try to get back to take some pictures of the finished project. Again, thanks for the advice guys (especially Tom!) [thumbs up]
