A side note: Those stair kits will never pass code unless you have a perfectly level, flat ground under the deck. Precut stair stringers are a joke! A person can't even lay out stairs correctly until they mark a minimum of 3 elevations: 2 at the first riser and another for the deck surface. Only then can you lay out the stringers so all the steps meet code. To: Mr Aidan M. I don't sell stair kits. The deck packages are a pile of lumber that still needs to be cut. Primary focus of thedeckbarn is aluminum balusters. Which if you quit railing off on the mouth you could save a lot of money buying by knowing me. I am in this to save you money on quality products period. I flat out am sick and tired of the retail prices larger manufacturers want to impose on deck builders, most of whom are hard working guys trying to make a buck. While various greedy muck racking profiteers sit in their boadrooms and are only concerned with market share. John Hyatt: You could have a very valid point in your statement about the different areas of the country affecting products differently. To which one might surmise that this whole deal is a regional issue and there is no perfect decking for any one area. With the SA and Chinese you still have the arguements about imports, buying american etc. What I do know for as fact is that Trex works up here and so does NewTech Composite. I have built enough decks up here to know. NewTech is coming out with capstock decking and it will be available Mid March. NewTech has 4 regional warehouses, California, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Texas. It is sold in Europe, Australia, China and THE United States. They have 43 dedicated lines making decking 24/7 365. Their lines ares dedicated to a single color to avoided the variances in batches caused by having to purge the extrusion lines for color changes. Steve Scholl MR SPAM

Timber Teck makes a T&G decking product. TT rial system is nice looking fairley easy to install but very spendy. What I found along with all the bashing...complaints on composite were about the material itself...complaints on South American lumber were mainley about a bad install/finish job. Its very possible to have a T&G ipe project I have several of them out including my own hot tub room floor. East Teak is a full service Mill that is they can machine/dry the lumber any way you want. There are a few little tricks involved with this install but nothing I could not explain if your Contractor is willing to learn and pay attention to detail, of course this is true with any high end decking. JonMon

Thanks for the synthetic deck warning. I do like going barefoot but given the location/size I'm strictly picking based on color/looks vs. feel preference. I did read the other poster's complaint - but put some shoes on the poor kids feet if it is such an issue. :) Depending on the moment I am switching between Ipe vs. composite but I really like the Ipe deck that Scotte posted the other day...he really messed me up. The deck is so small that if I don't like it, I can always annoy my husband and make him switch it out in the future. We aren't really worried about the money issue. But your supply list is a big help as we weren't sure if we wanted the 6 inch tube or the 8 inch tube and you anwsered that one. My husband's big confusion is if the concrete pad is existing and he attaches a bracket to that for the post or drills a hole in the concrete pad and adds a rod (as the book showed) could that work vs. the tube. He just prefer's not to break up the concrete slab. He doesn't mind the extra work to make it to code/structurally sound or the cost given the project given the size shouldn't be that expensive (expecially compared to everything else we are doing). He has to form a plan in his mind before starting this and he's in his brainstorming phase... you've been a huge help. He is worried if he calls the building code people they will give us a stop order and make us pull a permit. While we in theory have no issue getting a permit, they will not fix our sidewalk on the county rightaway, so I refuse to pull permits for this stuff till they fix my sidewalk! Plus, we are replacing it, not building new and are doing our best to build it to code (which is why we are asking for help). Oh, can you explain why the frostline is important - my husband is getting stumped on that a little too. Thank you again! We are almost there and it will one way or another be going in next weekend.

We put down a trex deck on east side of our home with lots of shade 3 years ago. No problems with mold until we had a very wet spring and summer in minnesota this year. I expected to have to wash and maintain this low maintenance deck. We had lots of mold staining everywhere on deck. After tring Behr deck mold and remover with no luck I was extremely unhappy. Tried Simplying Green full strength with no luck. After pulling out my hair and complaining to my husband about why he wanted composite instead of wood I told him I would have been better off spending 2 days staining a real wood deck. After lots of reading on various threads on composite decking problems and trex websites on how to clean it,I finally found a product that working amazing! I used Mold Armour ez deck wash from Home Depot. I know the product contains a bleach solution but it worked in a matter of min. I did wet down the surrounding areas with a water hose including the railings and grass. Wet down the deck boards first before applying the product with a soft brush in an ice cream pail. No scrubbing was required but I had control with application by this method. I did small section at a time and rinsed off after only 5 min or so. You can see the product work! Be careful not to let solution on boards to long because it does contain bleach and bleach will fade anything it comes in contact with. I did this project on July 4 and want to see how long mold stays away. I plan on buying a more eco friendly product in future like Corte Clean but didnlt try it this time because no stores in our area carry it and it is quite expensive. You also have to watch expiration date and have to buy it on line. Has anyone had luck with this product with mold spots and how long does the mold stay away with Corte Clean or Mold Armour? By the way my deck looks amazing and has no structure problems like some I have been hearing about. My husband built deck himself and followed all the proper guidllines to install. We also used hidden fastener system for instalation and used proper support system underneath. We have the saddle color with accents brand. Hopefully the mold issue will be a controllable one since we plan on staying ahead of it this time and not wait so long to wash it. We also had alot of snow this winter and I didnt always get out there to promply to remove snow. Let me know if you have had better luck with other products as I dont want to use a product so often that contains bleaching agents. Still wish my husband would have agreed with me to use cedar but I lost the battle and had to settle for composite. I keep telling him I told you so about composite and I am stuck with an $8,000 deck that is not low maintenance. I appreciate any feedback on a sealer or something to put down so i only have to wash deck to maintain and keep mold spots at bay. Any luck with sealers or stains?