What’s in this deck building guide?
Before You Begin: Planning
A deck can be a big undertaking. Whether it’s a new deck, a deck remodel, or a deck tear-down, all of them involve a great deal of materials, space, time, and tools. It’s essential to plan every step of the process and pull a permit so you can make sure your deck is built safely and meets local codes. Not only think through how to do each step, but where you’ll stage everything and what you’ll do when it rains. Our deck building guide includes how-to, tips, and videos that help.
Deck Ideas and Inspo
Before you start ordering materials or asking deck builders to come out to look at your backyard, try to get a pretty good vision for what you want.
What size do you want? Do you want to be able to place a dining table and chairs? Or do you want a cozy space with a coffee table? Is a grill part of the plan? Do you want a privacy screen? Where would stairs make the most sense for how you live?
While you can hire a deck builder and rely on their expertise to build a deck, you’ll get the deck you want if you are clear about what you want in the initial meeting.
Deck Materials
There are a variety of material options when it comes to decks, and most of them can make sense for many backyards. A wood deck with wood decking is the most budget-friendly choice. It’s also a great choice in sunny backyards. However, composite decking, like Trex, is a good choice in shady and moist yards but composite can get super hot in the summer sun, and can burn human and pet toes.
Deck structures are usually wood, but posts can be set with Post Protectors or Sonotubes. And then there are guardrails, which most people just call railings. There’s wood, powder coated metal, cable railing, and glass.
Think through the materials that will best fit your budget and vision for your backyard deck with our blogs and videos that can help guide you.
Deck How-To
From setting the ledger board to digging holes for posts and securing decking, it’s helpful to review the how-to for each part of the deck building process before you get started. We use a method that Mark invented called Top-Down Deck Framing, which is a process that can be executed by a DIYer. We’ve detailed every step of the deck building process so you can learn how to build a deck in real life.
Deck Videos
Watch our deck building guide series that details every step of building a deck. We also have videos that show deck building tips on top caps of railings, decking spacing, installing cable railing, and building dog gates and privacy screens to make your deck space meet your needs.
DIY or Ask a Pro
Deck building may seem like an easy project that any DIYer could execute over a summer. And many have built a deck in their backyard. However, we’ve seen some DIY decks that needed some serious structural help and weren’t built to code. A qualified residential deck contractor can bring structure to chaos by offering expertise and practical solutions when things don’t go as expected. And as deck pros, we can evaluate your old deck to see if you can salvage the structure and just repair what’s decayed or cracked.
We have experience handling structural surprises and design elements that don’t always work out as planned. Contact us about your project.
