Miz0133:
I realize we are dealing with semantics here..., maybe to avoid the truth, you know, we don’t. You may be the owner, and you may be pretending to play structural engineer on this deck project, but the real question was, are you a Structural Engineer by formal education, and are you a Registered Professional Engineer, so you have a vague idea what you are doing? If you were a real engineer, you wouldn’t be asking the questions you are asking, in the way you are asking them. So, the question still stands, JAE was right on the money. You need more than a Simpson catalog to do this right. Anyone can slap a deck together, but a lot of them don’t even start to comply with the intent of the building codes, let alone the letter of the code verbiage.
That deck looks like a cobbled mess. And, you will have to do a little investigative work to understand what’s going on, if you weren’t the builder.
1.) Why is the ledger built in 4' lengths? What is it attached to and how? Why don’t we see any through bolts in the ledger? Do we see stucco over a brick veneer in the photos? Does the code allow a deck ledger to be attached to brick veneer?
2.) You have to dig deep enough so you can draw a detailed section through that bldg. wall; the window head jamb, the window header, the rim joist and floor framing, etc. It’s a fairly short deck span, but it does load the window header. Wishing won’t do the trick here, and concealed hangers don’t count unless you can prove they are there. But then, what are they attached to?
3.) Why are there different sized deck joists, and why aren’t they well seated in their hangers? The hangers will not carry their rated joist loads when they are nailed into the ledger through the .75" end shim boards (your spacer boards). Those nails aren’t acting in shear btwn. the ledger and the hanger, they are acting as .75"+ cantilevers btwn. the hanger and the ledger. What is their penetration into the ledger and their size (dia.)? What the heck was the original intent of those spacer boards, they just don’t make much sense?
4.) Is the ledger and deck properly flashed? What prevents water from getting behind the stucco below the ledger? Why remove that corner column, you’ll just be left with stucco to patch in an awkward location?
5.) The ledger should be mounted tight to solid wall sheathing and/or the rim joist. There should not be several layers of other building materials or void space btwn. them.
