finley_wells66•3mo agoMost Upvoted

Tbh, my deck in the backyard almost collapsed last month because I didn't check the ledger board lag bolts.

Honestly, I found out the hard way that the original builder in my 1995 house in Charlotte only used 3-inch nails to attach it to the frame, and after 3 years of heavy rain, the whole thing was pulling away from the house.

3 comments

3 Comments

hernandez.brooke3mo ago

My neighbor's deck in Asheville fell off last summer.

viola_butler3mo ago

That's insane, the whole deck just fell off? What did it land on, their yard or the house below? Those Asheville hills are no joke, bet the view was great until it wasn't. Sounds like someone skipped a few inspections.

elizabeth_ramirez1mo ago

Hold up, I'm gonna play the other side here. Maybe that deck served its owners perfectly fine for twenty years and they just got unlucky with a freak storm or a raccoon chewing through a support beam. Not everything is about skipping inspections, you can be thorough as hell and still get a bad bolt. @hernandez.brooke said her neighbor's deck fell off too, but maybe both were just old and nobody thought to replace them because they looked fine. The view was probably worth the risk for a while, and now they've got a free patio on the ground level. Just saying, sometimes things break without someone being negligent.