Plan For Eventual Replacement

If you are a property manager or an Association, do you know how to plan the deck maintenance funding reserves? Repairing a waterproof deck is an expensive capital cost that has to be planned for well in advance.

This article explains some of the issues.

About The Author

Bill Leys of Central Coast Waterproofing shares his experience with how to plan for funding your maintenance plan over the life span of the building.

big capital cost

Deck coatings replacement is one of the most expensive outlays an Association will make. Selecting a coating with a longer maintenance span between regular resealing cycles lowers reserve costs over the life span of the deck.

Access to the decks will affect your costs of maintenance and replacement. Decks with stairs leading up to them are much easier to work on than decks accessible by a ladder or scaffolding or bucket truck.

Total square footage combined with how large or small each deck is also affects costs. It costs more to send a man up a ladder to do work on a deck that measures 50 square feet than it does to do 300 square feet.

Time setting up a ladder, setting up a work area on the ground for mixing materials, climbing up and down the ladder and breaking down the equipment and moving it to the next deck all need to be factored in to reserve costs.

Accurately Determine Future Costs

Your reserve study specialist can assist you in calculating costs for maintenance and replacement, but it may be beneficial to pay a deck coatings company to also assist you.

That way the estimated reserve costs may be more accurate as the deck company is taking all the access and other issues into account.

Your reserve study should incorporate both the costs of maintenance of the existing coating and the costs of eventual replacement into the study. There should be two line items in the deck coating category - one for maintenance and one for replacement.

Deck maintenance requires proper funding of reserves because of the size of the expense of replacing the deck coatings.

Plan thoroughly as suggested and you will not have any financial shock when the time comes to repair your waterproof deck.