If you’re looking forward to spending some quality time with your friends and family on the deck or porch attached to your home, you are not alone. This can be an extremely pleasurable experience during most months of the year. However, it’s important to make sure that your deck or porch has the proper structural support. What do we mean?
Well, when a deck or porch is constructed, the structural requirements are typically considered to simply hold the weight of the deck or porch materials themselves. Indeed, the requirements will typically include some allowance for additional weight on the deck or porch – and it may even be considerable – but it usually does not account for specific concentrations of added weight. Take, for example, adding a hot tub to your deck. If the hot tub was not part of the original plans, the builder likely did not account for it when building the deck. A basic hot tub full of water and people can be around 5,000 pounds. Can your deck support that kind of weight being concentrated on a small area?
