The decking I installed a few years ago is deteriorating, and I’m already patching where the wood has broken or cracked. It’s still safe to walk on but becoming less so, and after talking to several folks I decided to replace the wood with composite boards.
Pressure-treated wood used to last for twenty or thirty years. Ten or so years ago the formula for treating the wood was changed, and no longer includes arsenic. With the new formula the boards have a useful life of five or six years, less if the area is shaded or kept moist in some other way. The dramatic lessening of useful life, the fact that composite boards are made largely with recycled materials, and the relatively low difference in price all contributed to my decision.
I’m in favor of no more arsenic in pressure-treated wood; I’m not happy about having to replace flooring that I put down not very long ago, but it’s an acceptable trade-off. Trying to balance all the factors is difficult. The composite boards are man-made, which is not environmentally friendly, but the manufacturer uses recycled materials. Wood is a natural material and a renewable resource, but it has to be painted or stained every few years, and paint or stain is also a man-made product. The composite boards will not need to be painted or stained and have a useful life of thirty years or so. If that holds true, I’ll be 102 when it’s time to replace the boards, and will probably leave that decision to someone else.
I’m trying to make my peace with the fact that I can’t replace the deck myself this time. Even if I could get all the boards unscrewed and removed from the framework, I would have no way to haul them to the dump. I no longer have the upper body strength or the stamina to do the installation work, so I’m hiring a good friend of mine who is a contractor to take care of this job. The estimate he gave me was much higher than I expected, but I know the information I was using to make my best guess as to the cost was two or three decades old. Paying today’s prices for materials and paying for labor instead of doing it myself means a much higher cost.
As I have said before, I like being old. I like the perspective it affords me, and appreciate the wide variety of experiences, good and bad, that I have had. It does, however, make things like this difficult, and I have to remind myself that “I remember when you could buy those materials for . . . . “ is a completely useless statement. How much things cost 10, 20, or 30 years ago is irrelevant and only functions to invite resentment that has no basis in fact. Worse, the notion of having today’s income and paying yesterday’s prices is more than a little delusional.
This problem with holding onto the aspects of the past we like while at the same time enjoying the advantages of the present obviously applies to more than home repair and remodeling.