Ipe Deck
The renovations continue and it’s time to for another project in the side yard (the fence was last summer). I got some ipe deck lumber from my friend Scott, who had it left over from some of design/build company’s jobs. The problem was I had a lot of short boards and there were some 1″ and some 3/4″. What to do? Ah ha, fly my 73 year-old, retired, engineer Dad for a week of manual labor. He’ll be able to figure it out.
We came up with a rough plan, use the 3/4″ boards for the small deck and because we had so many short lengths we hung the joist every 12″. I thought we’d have enough wood for the whole deck but we only had about 50%. Luckily MacBeath Hardwoods in town had a bunch of ipe boards in a pile out back of their warehouse. They had been there a while, so we were able to negotiate on the price, they even milled some down. Ipe turns grey over time so it didn’t match the other lumber I had. I was going to sand the whole deck but once it was installed I really liked the effect of different colors.
The problem with the lumber I had was a lot of the boards were warped and crowned. I did a little research and found this tool called the BoWrench which worked amazingly well. Without it we would’ve been hosed.
As for the hardware we bought screws specifically for ipe decks. Stainless steel, special threads, powder coated heads, but the crazy thing was they were 30 cents apiece! x 600. We had to counter-sink and pre-drill all the holes anyway so probably not worth it. It’s rock hard wood, funny enough the first hole I attempted to drill broke the bit. I had to get some Bosch titanium bits and they worked fine.
Anyway, the deck came out great. We lucked out on buying the exact amount of treated lumber for the structure. We weren’t really measuring the width of the boards to the final side but it worked out perfectly with out needing to rip the end board.





















