Backyard Deck Design & Construction...

Hi All -

Attached are a few shots of my backyard deck design and construction. Started with some basic requirements and the all-powerful “marking the ground with spray paint” technique – which then I morphed into a fundamental one-page design. You can see this is a two-level deck with composite decking material and PVC (Vinyl) rails. It’s also somewhat elevated… perhaps 8-9 feet off the ground at the highest point. Thereafter, my wife and I enumerated all possible attributes that we relevant to us: for the present and the future (anticipating what we might do to the yard in ~10 years). We listed everything we could think of… stair orientation, dealing with rerouting hose bibs and dryer vents, the need for gates, adding a removable lattice panel for access, etc.

I bought a software rendering package and then actually “built” the deck in software (along with a pretty accurate rendering of the rest of my backyard) to get a much better feel as to how this would all look. This took a long time – but was well worth the effort. You can see some of the software rendering shots above as well.

Once we felt this was 95% of the way there – we started meeting with contractors: not only to interview, but to also review portfolios for additional tuning ideas and seek the wisdom of several folks who did this type of work all the time.

In the end, we hired an outstanding crew (could not have been happier with them) and the construction took almost 5 full days, soup-to-nuts.

I did this a few years ago, but there was so much effort put into the design considerations that I eventually wrote an entire article about it on my blog. If you have further interest, please feel free check that out at http://www.all-about-the-house.com/designing-the-perfect-deck.

One thing I can say for sure about this if it’s something you’re considering: this is such a large, complex and expensive project that I don’t think too much preparation is ever going to be a bad thing!

-- Mark, Jersey Shore, http://www.all-about-the-house.com