Actually YES!

Just yesterday. My wife and I went out into the beautiful crisp sunshine with a tape measure, a pad of paper, and a construction pencil. We took a close look at the existing framing and joists, and saw that our deck - contrary to our loosely-held belief it was 'rickety' - found it to be stoutly built on 4x10s, and all of the joists (except maybe one) are in great condition.

It's just the decking that has failed (due to a lack of diligent care for the wood), and the top boards on the railings have warped over time.

So we measured everything. Figured out how many linear board feet I'd need to replace all the decking - about 1,300 feet or so - and priced lumber and composites. Various lumber is around $1 per board foot, and composites are up to about $3.50 or so.

Worst case, that's $5k of materials. That I can EASILY install myself.

Which leaves us a healthy budget to do a nice black anodized aluminum railing, with a composite material top rail. ($7k, or so.) That would use narrower vertical aluminum pipes, rather than wood, which would greatly improve the view of the yard from the various second-floor house windows.

So yeah. I'm pretty jazzed about the whole thing now!

This is all preliminary right now... still need to do the structural math (composite is heavier than wood) and consult with the people at Dunn Lumber about decking solutions, but I'm very optimistic about the future of our deck for the very first time...