A deck is a beautiful outdoor asset to your home, and the right deck can make your living space seem larger. Hi, my name is Jackie, and I am a lover of all things related to the home. I enjoy decorating, repairing, restoring, and reading about ideas and even cleaning. Thanks to the success of our family business, I am able to work from home, and as I spend so much time here, I want it to look beautiful. If you want to have a beautiful home, I want to help you as well. In this blog, I am going to focus on decks in particular. I want to talk about repairing them, restoring them and reusing their old wood in new projects. If you want ideas or inspiration, I invite you to stay, take a look and enjoy these posts.
Repairing, Restoring and Repurposing Old Decking: Tips. Ideas and Facts
While You May Need to Look Below the Surface First to See Whether a Building Renovation Can Go Ahead
Esperanza Arias
If you've decided to purchase a property at a very attractive price due to the fact that it needs quite a lot of restoration, you will undoubtedly be considering your budget for repairs and getting together a team of experts to help you put the plan in place. While you may certainly have a lot of interior restoration work ahead of you, you must also consider whether or not the building will require any structural attention before you even think about moving ahead. What should be front and centre in your mind as you assess the entire project?
The Need for Reassessment
While the building in question would undoubtedly have been passed as safe and stable by structural engineers when it was first put up, you need to determine whether it is still able to support the loads and fulfil the function it was designed for. This will require input from a qualified structural engineer, who will have the tools and expertise to reveal anything untoward.
Starting from the Beginning
To begin with, the land upon which your new acquisition is built will need to be re-surveyed, to make sure that it is not contaminated in any fashion that would render any building unsafe. It's important to reassess the condition of drains and sewers that service the building, as well.
Research will be conducted to determine whether any significant events over recent years may have contributed to any instability, including the potential for water intrusion, damage from external structures or trees or major storm events.
Looking under the Surface
The foundation will be assessed for the presence of any cracks or instability, to determine how stable the concrete slab is. The capability of the foundation will depend on the type of soil beneath and checks will be carried out to determine how any settlement may have affected its bearing capacity. In technical terms, it is possible that a differential settlement may have occurred, where one part of the structure may have been more affected than another and this can sometimes happen when specific types of soil expand after weather events.
It may be necessary to upgrade or enhance the foundations by adding strips of concrete to transfer weight from columns and walls to the bedrock or soil, or to add reinforcement to an existing slab.
Revealing Any Issues
Make sure that you bring in qualified experts to help reveal any problems that you might not be able to see with the untrained eye, before proceeding with any detailed reconstruction.
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