Tips for taking care of your deck:

           Treat your deck like you would your wood floors inside your house...

• Clean up any spills so they don’t stain or damage the coating.

• Don’t leave anything, such as cardboard or rags or carpeting that hold water, sitting on the deck

• Raise flower pots up off of the deck so water doesn’t get trapped under them - you can buy plastic "feet" at most hardware stores

• Hose the dirt off your deck whenever you think about it. (Rain does not wash the deck it leaves a coating of dirt on the floor.)
• Once or twice year take some antibacterial dish liquid dissolve it in a bucket of warm water and pour it on the deck. Use a broom to sweep it around the deck and loosen the dirt then rinse it with the hose. This will give the deck a refreshed look and is a great thing to do after the winter. During the season doing this will help control the growth of the green algae on the deck.
• Do NOT use any harsh chemicals or bleach based cleaners on the deck this will ruin the protective properties of the sealer.
• Do not reseal your deck yourself. Without proper power washing and using the correct sealer we may end up chemically stripping the deck when its time to redo it again.

Are those beautiful flowers on your deck going

to leave you with costly water damage?

• Raise pots off deck; don’t fill pots full of dirt use Styrofoam half-way.
• Don’t permanently fasten flower boxes to the railing.
• Built in boxes should either have inserts or be completely lined with built in drainage.

A lot of people like to have flowerpots and flower boxes full of beautiful fragrant flowers on the deck. They bring vibrant colors up close and enhance our outdoor living space. Putting flower boxes on your railings and flowerpots on your deck can also give you an expensive headache in the form of rot and structural damage.

This doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy nature’s beauty up close and on your deck. It just means that you have to do it the right way by taking some precautions to minimize the possibility of damage to your deck. The most important thing to do regardless of whether or not you have planters on your deck is to keep your deck sealed. This is key to keeping water under pots or boxes from penetrating into your wood. But do not reseal the deck yourself. The Association will arrange for this to happen on a regular basis.

The next thing you want to do is to raise all the pots off of the deck buy using some sort of feet. These feet are sold at garden supply stores. Stay away from wooden feet because they absorb and hold water. Metal feet have a tendency to rust and will permanently stain the deck if left for to long. The best kinds are plastic or composite feet and if those aren’t available go for the stone feet. By raising the pots off of the deck you get air flow under the pot and give the deck a chance to dry out.

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Page Last Updated October 1, 2007

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