Signs Your Deck Needs Repair or Replacement (and When a Resurface Is Enough)

How long a deck actually lasts on the coast

Service life depends on material and upkeep, but the honest ranges are these. A pressure-treated wood deck typically gives 15–20 years, with well-maintained examples lasting longer. Cedar runs 15–30 years depending on how faithfully it's cleaned and refinished. Quality composite boards are warranted for 25–50 years by their manufacturers, with the frame underneath — almost always treated lumber — becoming the limiting factor. A vinyl membrane deck is a different animal: the membrane is a roof, and we cover its lifespan and failure signs in our strata balcony guide.

The takeaway: if your wood deck is past fifteen, it has earned a proper look — not because it's necessarily failing, but because the failures that matter are the ones you can't see from a lawn chair.

The ten-minute check you can do yourself

Take a flashlight and a screwdriver. Work from the house outward.

1. Probe for rot. Push the screwdriver tip into the wood at the ledger (where the deck meets the house), the post bases, the stair stringers, and anywhere water sits. If it sinks in 6–12 mm with little effort, or the wood feels spongy, you've found decay. Surface greying is cosmetic; softness is structural.
2. Look hard at the ledger. This is the single most common point of deck failure. It should be bolted — not just nailed — to the house framing, with metal flashing above it directing water out over the deck. Staining, debris collecting at the joint, or any gap between ledger and wall is a red flag.
3. Check the fasteners. Popped nails, loose screws and heavy rust all matter. Rust matters more on decks built after 2004, when the old CCA treatment gave way to copper-rich ACQ and similar chemistries: those preservatives corrode ordinary zinc-plated hardware quickly, which is why code now calls for hot-dip galvanized or stainless steel in contact with treated wood. Orange streaks below joist hangers are not a cosmetic problem.
4. Grab the railing. Push on posts and the top rail. Any give at all means the post connection or the post base is compromised — or the guard was never built to carry a load. Check that pickets or cables are tight and that no opening will pass a 100 mm ball.
5. Walk the stairs. Stringers and treads should be solid, without bounce; probe where the stringers meet the ground or the landing.
6. Look at the footings. Posts sitting on or in soil, concrete piers that have heaved or sunk, or a deck that is visibly out of level since last year point to foundation problems that no surface work fixes.
7. Read the surface. Cupping, splitting and persistent ponding tell you the boards are near the end; spongy spots tell you the joists under them may be too.
8. If there's a membrane, look underneath. Ceiling stains below a sundeck or balcony, or lifting and bubbling vinyl, mean waterproofing has failed — and whatever is under it is getting wet.

Repair, resurface, or replace?

This is the decision our assessments exist to make, and the framework is simpler than it looks.

• Repair when the damage is isolated and the frame is sound: a handful of rotten boards, a loose railing section, a failed flashing detail, a sagging stair. Done promptly, these are modest jobs that buy years.
• Resurface when the surface is finished but the structure is not: the joists, beams, posts, ledger and footings pass the probe test, and only the decking (and often the railing) needs replacing. This is how a tired pressure-treated deck becomes a composite or vinyl deck on its existing bones — but only after the frame has actually been inspected, because laying a 30-year surface over a 5-year frame is money thrown away.
• Replace when rot has reached the ledger, beams or posts; when footings have moved; when the framing is undersized or built in ways today's code won't accept; or when a wood deck is past 20–25 years and the repairs are arriving faster than you can schedule them. At that point each individual fix is reasonable and the sum of them is not.

Stop using the deck if you see these

Some signs aren't "schedule an assessment" — they're "keep people off it until someone looks." A visible sag in the frame, a ledger separating from the house, posts rotten at the base, a railing that moves when leaned on, or stairs that shift underfoot. Decks fail at the worst moments — parties, dinners, full loads of people — precisely because that's when the weak connection finally gives.

What a professional assessment adds

Our ten-minute list finds the obvious problems. A professional assessment probes the parts you can't reach, checks the ledger attachment and flashing properly, reads the footings, measures the guards against the code that applies to your municipality, and — crucially — gives you a straight answer on whether a repair is worth it. Across Metro Vancouver our assessments are free, and if the deck is genuinely at the end, you'll get a replacement scope and a real number rather than a sales pitch.

Quick answers

How long does a deck last in Vancouver? Roughly 15–20 years for pressure-treated wood, 15–30 for cedar with maintenance, 25+ for composite with a sound frame. Our rain shortens the low end of those ranges for decks that weren't detailed or maintained well.

Can I just replace the boards? Yes — if the frame, ledger and footings pass inspection. That's a resurface, and it's often the best-value option for a deck that's structurally fine but ugly or splintering.

Is a wobbly railing dangerous? Yes. A guard is a fall-protection system; any movement means it can't be trusted to hold a leaning adult. It's also one of the cheaper things to fix properly.