Seventy Years On, Nobody Has Seen This Deck

San Bernardino County Land Use Services, because Bloomington is unincorporated. That surprises a lot of people, since it is bordered by Fontana, Rialto and Colton, all of which run their own city building departments — but none of those has jurisdiction here, and a permit application to the wrong authority is time you do not get back.

It is worth confirming for your parcel rather than assuming from a mailing address, because boundaries in this part of the county are not always where people expect. A contractor who is vague about which authority governs your address has not done the basic homework on the job. The inspection that comes with the county permit is the part worth having: on a house where the deck has not been seen in seventy years, it is the independent confirmation that what was found underneath was actually dealt with. We confirm the path and file at the start of the project.

Board decking is individual boards laid across the rafters, which is how roofs were built before sheet sheathing became standard. It is not defective and it does not automatically need replacing — plenty of it is still perfectly sound after seventy years.

What matters is the gaps between the boards and the condition of the individual boards. Modern covering assemblies assume a continuous substrate, so where gaps are wide the usual answer is a solid overlay laid over the existing boards rather than tearing all the boards off. Individual boards that have split at their fastenings or gone soft get replaced. Occasionally a house has spaced sheathing from an original wood shake roof, where the gaps are deliberate and wide, and that always needs a solid substrate. Which of those you have is genuinely visible from the attic in most cases, which is why we look before quoting rather than after opening.

Mostly because of what is under the covering, and to a lesser extent because of what has been added to the house. A modern tract home has a known, continuous deck and a simple roofline. A 1950s or 60s house on a large lot has an unknown deck, usually one or two porches or patio covers added at different times, and junctions between them that all need detailing.

The deck is the item most likely to move the price. Where a solid substrate has to go down across the whole roof, that is real sheet material and real labour on top of the covering itself. That is precisely why we price the deck scenarios in the written estimate rather than carrying a vague allowance — so the possibility is a known number before you commit rather than a conversation on day two. A bid on a house of this age that never mentions the deck has either not looked in the attic or is planning to raise it later.

On a house this old it is a poor idea even where code would permit a second layer. An overlay leaves the existing covering, the existing fastening and — crucially — the existing deck completely unexamined, which on a seventy-year-old roof means declining to look at the one thing most likely to need attention.

There is also a practical problem specific to board decking. Fastening a new layer through an old covering into boards that may have split at their existing nail lines is not a reliable connection, and it is the kind of weakness that shows up in a wind event rather than immediately. Code generally caps residential roofs at two covering layers, so on many of these houses an overlay is not available anyway. The honest scope is a tear-off to the deck, an assessment of what is there, and a new single-layer assembly. It costs more and it is the version that resets the clock.

Worth including, and worth pricing separately so you can see the choice. On these semi-rural lots the outbuildings are frequently older than the house’s current covering and are usually the roofs actually failing, even though the house is what prompts the call.

Doing them in the same visit is meaningfully cheaper per square, because mobilisation, staging, permitting effort and disposal are shared across more work rather than sitting on one roof. The patio or porch cover deserves particular attention: it is normally low-slope, it often carries shingles that were never appropriate for its pitch, and it terminates against a house wall — the detail most likely to have been quietly wetting framing. Because our licence is Class B General Building, the framing and wall repair that turns up on old outbuildings and porch junctions is in scope rather than being a reason for the job to stop.

Yes. CSLB #1105333 is a Class B General Building licence, covering framing and sheathing repair, rafter tails, fascia, soffit, insulation, and the interior drywall and paint — as one scope with the roof.

On a house of this age that breadth is close to a necessity rather than a convenience. A leak that has been running at a porch junction or an old flashing detail for a decade has usually damaged wall or roof framing before anything appeared on a ceiling, and finding a carpenter to take on a small structural repair inside somebody else’s roofing job is harder than it should be. Under one licence the crew that opens the roof and finds it is the crew that fixes it. Free roof inspection including a look at the deck from the attic, and financing available if the full scope is larger than you planned to spend at once.