Decks & Outdoor Living.

A deck lives outdoors in one of the harder climates in the country, bolted to the side of a heated building. Two things decide whether it lasts: what it stands on, and how it is attached to the house. Footings that stop above frost depth will heave, and a deck that heaves takes its railings, its stairs and sometimes the ledger out of alignment with it. We take footings below frost — around four feet in most of this province — and confirm the depth with the municipality rather than assuming.

The ledger connection is where decks fail dangerously rather than just annoyingly. It has to be flashed so water cannot get behind it into the rim joist, and fastened with the right hardware into solid framing. A ledger nailed on and left unflashed rots the band joist from behind over several years, and the first sign is often the deck moving. We flash it, we fasten it properly, and on a rebuild we always look at what the old one did to the house.

For the salt and wind: hot-dip galvanized or stainless hardware near the coast, because standard fasteners corrode, stain the decking and eventually lose their grip. Composite decking is popular here for good reason — it does not need annual attention and it handles wet, freeze-thaw and UV well — but it moves more than wood with temperature, so gapping and fastening have to be right. We build railings and privacy walls to handle wind load rather than treating them as decoration.