MSU Red Cedar Message Board

This, and as well they should. It is the recognized IBC standard for this climate zone.

I had a deck restoration division of the business I owned for 8 years. Best is composite for ease of care. I would never do pressure treated. DO NOT do anything to cedar first year. Use Sherwin products for cleaning and staining. I would recommend a semi-transparent water based stain of your color choice. When pressure washing, practice on a scrap board laid in the driveway or such. Key is to be about 6 inches from wood at a slight angle, using correct spray nozzle attachment.
Talk to Sherwin guys about all facets. I have personally done about 500 decks myself and usually last about 5 years (in harsh Minnesota) before having to touch again.

I used a post hole digger for mine, (I only needed 4 posts) it wasn't bad. It was all clay, ran into a couple rocks but still got them done within a couple hours.

Dig the holes 42" deep, use concrete to fill in the holes, not gravel. Trust me.

I built mine with pressure treated wood, and used a colored stain. I wouldn't recommend this, I need to touch up the stain every year due to wear and tear and shoveling every winter. I probably should have used composite but I wanted a particular color.

Go to the lumber yard and get the name of a guy who digs post holes for a living. For about the same cost of renting a post hole digger he'll come out and dig the post holes for you. They usually charge 8-10 bucks per hole, and will be done in about 30 minutes. You and your buddy will spend half a day going to get the machine, screwing around figuring out how to use it, then returning the machine. Sink them to 42 inches, fill with concrete and put brackets in the wet concrete to hold the posts. Don't sink the posts into the concrete.

My big issue with composite (besides it being about 4 times the cost of PT) is that the color does not last like they claim. I had built a work table for my Grill using composite, colored a medium brown. Within 3 months it weathered grey like any other wood, went to the mfrs website and they claimed hitting it with an oxidyzing cleaner and the color would come back, nope. Turns out any composite with wood as part of its make up will turn grey eventually. I just had the table so it wasn't a huge deal for me, but if I had a whole deck of it expecting it to be the medium brown ('cedar') color that I was sold I'd be pissed. Secondarily, most of these come with some sort of embossed finish that, in my case, attracts alot of dust and dirt and then mold grows on it. so you have to clean it fairly often. That said, I am heading into the 3rd refinishing of my PT deck since 2005, it will cost me about 200 bucks for stripper, cleaner, finish and probably two weekends to complete. I'm tempted to just let it go, wood goes bad over the next 4-6 years and buy new boards and put them down in one day, live with for 10 years, repeat. Redoing these things is a pain in the ass.

Bump - Forgot to update this last year, but was staining the stairs today and thought about this.

Finished up last year, with some to do's for this spring (stain stairs, add lattice, etc). Ended up going with:

16'x29'
Treated for the joists/ledgers
Cedar for everything else

We ended up not attaching to the house with a ledger. I wasn't comfortable doing that so we added in an extra row of supports and there isn't a creak or noise out of it.. The cedar looks awesome. I knew going into it that it would be soft and scratch up a bit, so I have had no issues there. The staining takes a whole afternoon, but I actually kind of enjoy taking care of it after I put so much time into it. I had help getting the holes augured and the joists/beams in. After that I built the rest myself and hand build each section of the railing.

Had my father in law install a sliding door for easy access too and then we put in a little vegetable garden in front with left over lattice to keep out the rascally rabbits.

The main issue I had was when I got about 4-5 rows of boards down a storm knocked a neighbors tree right onto the section I had finished. Only had 2 boards break, so I got lucky there.

As for stain, I used a semi-transparent called ReadySeal. So far no major issues. Went on easy and seems to do its job pretty well. I re-stained today because I had leftover and I had to do the stairs anyway, but probably didn't need to.

We rented the auger and it was the best money spent. We had 15 holes to dig. Got to use the auger for 11 of them and had to dig 4 by hand due to gas line concerns (then 2 more later when doing the steps). They really need to invent a better post hole digger. Once you get to about 36 inches, you cant get anything out. I ended up chopping the dirt up with the diggers and using a shop vac to get the dirt out. Was way quicker that way.

We got really lucky with the auger though. The guys marked the gas line for us, but they were off by over a foot. We pulled the auger out and realized we ran right up against it, but no damage.

Use the brackets where you screw the planks from the bottom and pull them to the frame