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Watched a 1962 bungalow porch go from sagging mess to dead level in one weekend, and the cause was dumber than I guessed
A neighbor two streets over in Amarillo asked me to look at her front porch last month because the whole thing sloped toward the house and water pooled at the door. I figured rotted rim joist, maybe a settled footing, the usual money pit. Pulled the skirt off and it was just one thing: somebody had stacked about 14 inches of flagstone pavers on top of the decking years ago, and the extra load had slowly crushed the 2x6 joists over time. We jacked it up, sistered new joists on both sides, and dropped the paver count down to 4 inches. Two days of work and the bubble on my 4 foot level sits dead center now. That porch must have dropped close to 3 inches over 15 years and she never connected it to the stone until we lifted it. What gets me is the deck boards were fine the whole time, just bent. Has anyone run into a porch or deck that was overloaded like that instead of actually rotting?
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stellanelson15h ago
The part about the deck boards bending instead of breaking is what gets me. Wood is way more forgiving than people give it credit for, and a slow overload like that just makes it creep and sag instead of snapping, which is why nobody notices until the water starts running the wrong way. Any deck holding up a hot tub or a big planter box is probably doing the same thing right now, just slower. That 14 inches of stone was basically a hot tub spread out over the whole porch. Good catch on dropping it to 4 inches, because if she had just jacked it up and left all that weight up there it would have squished right back down in a few years.
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