If your deck has gone soft in a corner, turned grey and green, or developed a wobble in the rail, the first thing you want to know is what it is going to cost to put right. It is a fair question, and a frustrating one, because the honest answer is that there is no single price for a decking repair. A couple of soft boards and a full subframe rebuild are different jobs with very different bills. What we can do is walk you through what drives the cost, share the few genuinely Irish figures worth quoting, and be straight about why we will not pin an exact number on your deck until we have seen it. If you want the bigger picture on fixing versus restoring a deck, our deck repairs and restoration page covers the full service.
Why There Is No Flat Price
Decking repairs sit on a wide scale. At the small end, swapping two or three soft boards in the wettest corner is an afternoon’s work. At the big end, a rotten subframe means stripping the deck back to the ground and effectively rebuilding it. Everything else lives between those two, and the price tracks the work, not a tariff.
That is why a flat “decking repair costs €X” figure online is close to meaningless. The same advice holds in the trade everywhere: the cost depends on the extent of the damage, the material, the access and crucially what is going on underneath. A US repair-cost guide from Fixr puts the same point plainly, noting that you should never lay new boards over rotten framing, because you will only be paying to address it again later. The figures in those guides are dollars and not much use here, but the logic is universal: the frame decides the job.
So instead of inventing a number, here is what actually moves the price up or down.
What Drives the Cost of a Repair
A handful of factors decide whether your repair is a small job or a big one.
- How far the rot has spread. A board or two gone soft in one damp spot is minor. Rot that has travelled into the joists and posts is a different and bigger job, because the structure, not just the surface, has to be put right.
- Whether the subframe is involved. This is the single biggest factor. Surface-only repairs are cheap relative to anything that touches the frame. Once posts or joists are failing, you are into structural work.
- The board material. Replacing pressure-treated softwood is straightforward and the timber is cheap. Matching old composite, or sourcing hardwood, costs more and can be tricky if the original board is discontinued.
- Access. A ground-level deck you can easily get under is quick to inspect and fix. A raised deck, or one boxed in tight against the house with no air gap, takes longer to reach and work on.
- How much restoration goes with it. If the repair is paired with a full clean, sand and re-stain of the whole deck, that prep work adds to the bill, though it is still far cheaper than replacement.
A quick word on the rot itself, because it helps you judge your own deck. Timber does not rot from honest rain; it rots where water sits and cannot dry out, and where bare cut ends soak damp up out of sight. That is why a repair that just swaps the soft boards but ignores the trapped damp will rot again in the same spot. A sound repair fixes the cause, gets air and run-off back under the boards and seals the bare timber, so the new work lasts. It costs a little more than a quick patch and it is worth every cent of the difference.
The Few Irish Figures Worth Quoting
Honest Irish repair pricing is thin online, and we would rather say that than make numbers up. But restoration is one area where a real Irish figure exists.
A Dublin deck-staining service lists professional staining at roughly €10 to €25 per square metre, or about €200 to €500 for a typical 20 square metre deck, with the rate depending on the product and the condition of the timber. That is for the staining itself. A full restoration, which is a proper clean to lift the algae and grime, a sand back to fresh timber, then the re-stain or oil, costs more than stain alone because of the prep, but it lands a long way below a rebuild.
For comparison, the same source puts full deck replacement at around €200 to €300 per square metre. Our own decking cost guide sets out the ranges we work to across Louth in more detail. The gap between those two numbers, a few hundred euro to restore versus a few thousand to replace, is exactly why we look before we quote. A lot of tired grey decks that people have written off just need restoring, and that is the cheapest good news in this trade.
Board replacement and subframe repairs we price per job rather than per metre, because the variables above swing them too widely for a headline figure to be honest.
A Word on Callouts
People often ask about a callout charge. For us the quote visit is free: we come out, get under the deck where we can, and tell you in writing what the job needs and what it costs. You are not paying just to find out where you stand.
Where a small minimum can apply is on a tiny standalone job, say nipping out one board, where the travel and setup outweigh the work itself. We are local right across Louth, from Dundalk out to Blackrock, Carlingford, Ardee and the Cooley peninsula, so a callout is never a half-day’s drive for us, and we will always tell you up front if a job is too small to be worth a separate trip. If you are weighing up whether yours is a fix or a full rebuild, our guide on repairing versus replacing a deck runs through the same checks we do on site.
How We Quote It
After we have seen the deck you get a fixed, written, itemised price. The boards, the labour, any frame work, the restoration and the cleanup are listed separately, so you can see exactly what you are paying for and why. A small repair stays a small repair on the bill, and you are not left guessing whether the number covers the lot.
That is the part we will commit to over the phone: not the figure, but how the figure is built. An itemised quote means no creeping extras and no surprise at the end, which on repair work, where the unknown is what is under the boards, matters more than anything.
Got a deck that is soft, wobbly, green or just looking tired, and you want to know what it will cost to put right? Don’t write it off before we have looked. Call Seamus on 085 168 5170 for a free, itemised quote, or message us on WhatsApp. We will tell you straight whether it is a small fix or a bigger job, and price it honestly either way.