Emberbench Deck Works · Wrenbury Heath & Falcon Ridge · Building for the decades you plan to stay
A deck for the house you intend to grow old in.
Emberbench designs and builds what the trade calls stay-put outdoor floors: thresholds a wheelchair crosses without a bump, guards a four-year-old cannot climb and a pram can, lighting that comes on before the step does. The same cedar-and-composite craft as any good deck shop — measured against a fifty-year body instead of a thirty-year mortgage.
EVERY EMBERBENCH DECK PASSES THE WHEELCHAIR TEST BEFORE WE LEAVE — AND THE GRANDCHILD TEST, WHICH IS STRICTER
Not opinions — clearances
The numbers we build to
A stay-put deck is mostly arithmetic: a threshold a wheel can cross, a rail a hand can close on, a step deep enough for a walker to rest on, lighting at the change of grade. The numbers are published before the drawing is, so nobody has to take anybody’s word for the parts that matter.
THE STAIR LINE — the county’s own figures say most outdoor falls happen at a SINGLE step, the kind every back door seems to have. A stay-put survey either ramps it, landings it, or levels the whole floor to the threshold. The survey is free; the statistic is not going anywhere.
The threshold retrofit
from $3,900typical 2-day build
- Aluminium ramp or landings at the door
- Threshold ramped to a half-inch bump
- Existing step lit at the nose
- Graspable rail fitted inside the guard
The stay-put deck
from $61/sq ftdesigned and built
- Floor level with the threshold — no step at all
- Guards the four-inch sphere cannot pass
- Walker-depth steps with double handrails
- Lighting on a dusk sensor at every change
The covered room
from $14,800deck, roof and screens
- Everything in the stay-put deck
- Roof pitched to the walker’s sightline
- Screen door operable with one hand
- Gutter and dry path to the drive
What we do
What a stay-put deck changes
The threshold, deleted
The single step at the back door is the most dangerous piece of carpentry in the county, and the fix is not a handrail — it is a floor that arrives at the same height it left. New builds start level; retrofits ramp half an inch at a time until a wheel, a walker and a shoe with no toes all cross the same line.
Guards nobody can climb and nothing can pass
Guard infill a four-inch sphere cannot slip through — we bring the sphere — with no horizontal rail run between top and bottom for a four-year-old to ladder up. The top rail carries a graspable companion inside it at thirty-four inches, because hands and building inspectors ask different questions of the same rail.
Steps a walker can rest on, lit before you reach them
Treads cut deep enough to stand a walker on with both feet, rises short enough to take one leg at a time, double handrails that meet at the turn, and a dusk sensor that lights the nose of every step before your eyes ask. The light costs less than the first bruise.
Ninety minutes, free
How the survey runs
We measure with the same tape every deck shop uses and two they do not: the door swing of your worst month and the route the washing takes to the line. The survey ends with a written list of every clearance your house would need for its next fifty years — yours to keep whoever builds it.
The survey, with the sphere
Threshold heights, step counts, guard gaps and the routes that matter — measured, written and left with you, with the four-inch sphere demonstrated at the kitchen table.
The drawing at two horizons
The same plan printed twice: as built today, and with the clearances the house will want in twenty years — so the rails, the lift points and the lighting land in the first build, not a second one.
The build, one crew
Level floor first, guards to the sphere, steps to the walker, the dusk sensor last of all. The crew that starts your deck is the crew that walks the wheelchair test.
The test before we leave
A chair across the threshold, the sphere at every guard gap, the lights on at dusk — and the handover book with every clearance written in it, for the day somebody asks.
Heath & Ridge, 2024 — 2026
Built for the long stay
Six stay-put builds photographed at handover — two for families planning decades, three for parents who stopped planning around stairs, one for a garden railway that needed the level floor for entirely different reasons.
The wheelchair test, in the contract
Before the invoice, we wheel a loaded chair across your threshold, press the sphere to every guard gap, and watch the lights come on at dusk. If any of the three fails, the fix is ours and the schedule is ours too. The clause has run eleven times in six years — eight of them for a gate the sphere nearly passed.
My mother told every builder “just a small ramp” and every builder built a ramp that ended in gravel. Emberbench surveyed the whole route — door, deck, step, drive — and levelled the floor to the threshold instead. Her chair crosses the line like it was never there. She has taken to escorting the wheelie bin.
We are forty and healthy and hired them anyway, for the house we do not intend to leave. The drawing came twice — now, and the us-in-twenty-years version — and the second one paid for itself in the first build: the rail points, the lift route, the lighting runs. Our friends think it is a beautiful deck. It is that too.
The four-inch sphere is real and it comes out of the truck at the handover. Our grandson attempted the guard like a mountaineer and failed at the knee rail, loudly. The crew stayed to watch, which I think was the point of the whole demonstration.
At the survey, or the kitchen table
The questions every family asks
The survey answers them in your own doorway, free, in about ninety minutes — or the form below any hour, replied within one.
Is this only for older homeowners?
It is for houses whose owners intend to keep them. Half our builds go to families in their forties who want the rail points and the level threshold in the first build rather than a second one later — the clearances cost hundreds now and thousands as a retrofit, and they are invisible until the day they are not.
What does the code require, and what do you build to?
The code asks a 36-inch guard where the deck passes 30 inches above grade and infill a four-inch sphere cannot pass. We build to that and to the stricter tests the name implies: no climbable rail runs, graspable companion rails, half-inch thresholds, walker-depth treads. The code is a floor, not a target.
Ramp or level floor — which is right for us?
If the door sits high above grade, a ramp on a gentle one-in-twelve run, landings at the turns, and a rail both sides. If the framing allows it, the better answer is raising the whole floor to the threshold and deleting the step — no ramp to maintain, no slope to negotiate in ice, one level room.
Will it look like an institution?
The clearances are the invisible part. Cedar or composite boards, cable or glass infill where the view earns it, lighting that flatters the evening rather than interrogating it — a stay-put deck is a beautiful deck whose arithmetic was done fifty years deep. Most visitors cannot say what is different; they just feel that nothing is in the way.
Can you retrofit the deck we already have?
Often, yes — guards re-infilled, rails added, steps re-cut, the threshold ramped — typically a quarter of a rebuild. The survey says which side of that line your deck stands on, in writing, and it is yours to keep even if the honest answer is a new floor.
Surveys free across the Heath and the Ridge · (555) 059-4478 · hello@emberbenchdecks.example · the sphere rides in the truck
Book the ninety-minute survey
Who uses the door, what the next twenty years might ask of it, and the Saturday that suits — the written clearances are yours whoever builds. hello@emberbenchdecks.example