Deck Removal in Chicopee, MA

Deck removal is straightforward carpentry in reverse until it reaches the house. That last connection is the part that turns a demolition job into something that needs doing properly.

Pricing runs roughly $5 to $15 a square foot, so a 200 square foot deck is usually $1,000 to $3,000, and a large multi level one goes well beyond that. Most of the cost is labor and disposal volume, because a deck produces a surprising amount of lumber.

Freestanding decks are simple. Boards up, joists out, posts pulled, footings either left or dug out. A day for most residential sizes, and the pile is predictable.

The ledger board is the whole risk

Most decks are attached to the house by a ledger board bolted through the rim joist, behind the siding. Removing it exposes the structure of your house and whatever flashing was or was not installed underneath. On a deck old enough to be coming off, the answer is often not much, and there is frequently rot behind it. That has to be made watertight the same day, and it is siding and carpentry work rather than hauling. Decide before you book who is doing it, because a crew that pulls a ledger and leaves an open wall has created a much more expensive problem than the one you started with.

What the pile is made of

Almost all of it is pressure treated lumber, which is handled separately from clean wood because of the preservatives in it. Massachusetts banned wood from landfill disposal on 1 July 2006, so it goes to construction and demolition processing. It is bulky, it is full of nails and screws, and it fills a truck faster than the deck's footprint suggests.

Composite decking is a different material again and does not go to the same place as timber. If the deck is composite, say so, because the disposal route and the cost are not the same.

Then the footings. Concrete piers or sonotubes are heavy and are usually priced separately. Leaving them in the ground is cheaper and is often fine if nothing is going back on the spot. If you are rebuilding, the new build usually wants its own footings anyway.

A word about what is underneath

Decks are excellent habitat. Skunks, groundhogs and occasionally something less welcome live under low decks across this whole region, and a deck coming down in spring is likely to be occupied. It is worth looking before the day rather than finding out with a pry bar in hand.