The honest ledger
Cedar buys the smell. Composite buys the Saturdays.
We quote both on the same drawing with the ten-year arithmetic printed beside them: composite from $63 a square foot and a wash once a season; cedar from $54 and a day of oil every second spring. By year ten the money lands within ten percent of each other — the real difference is whether your Saturdays belong to the deck or to the deck stain.
What a season costs, installed
Composite deckfrom $63/sq ft
Trex & TimberTech lines, hidden clips
Cedar deckfrom $54/sq ft
5/4×6 western red, plugged screws
Helical pier foundation+$22/pier
torqued to gauge, no cure days
Cable rail, installedfrom $148/ln ft
316 stainless, code blocking included
Low-voltage lightingfrom $1,180/run
wired before the boards, schematic filed
What we do
Three rooms we know how to build
The bench room
Built-in benches drawn into the frame rather than bolted on after it — perimeter seating for twelve without a single lawn chair, with skirting that breathes so the timber underneath stays dry. The room that fits everybody, because the seats are carpentry.
The dinner deck
Sized to the table you own plus forty inches a side, boards gapped for this valley’s humidity rather than the brochure’s, and a picture-frame border so no cut end ever faces the garden. The room the whole family argues to keep.
The cook’s line
A grill bay with counter rail at bar height, a pergola over the working end, and lighting aimed where the tongs land. The pergola rafters are computed to the county’s 40-psf snow load — not the catalogue’s shade assumption — so it carries the winter it was drawn for.
Studio visits evenings and Saturdays · Alder Flats, Lark Crossing and the valley between · (555) 018-7742 · hello@solsticedecks.example
The portfolio is the pitch
Six decks, photographed at dusk
Every build is photographed at the hour it was designed for, because a deck photographed at noon is a deck photographed out of uniform. Ask at the visit and we will walk you past one this weekend.
How a build goes
From studio visit to first dusk
The same four movements on every build — the only variable is your yard. Helical piers mean no concrete trucks, no cure days and no spoil on the garden, so the calendar holds even when the weather does not.
The studio visit
We measure the yard, watch where the light goes and where the foot traffic wants to walk. You leave with a feasibility sketch and a budget band — yours to keep whoever builds it.
The drawing & the number
A scaled plan with your table on it and one fixed price that already carries the slope, the pier count and the frost line. It moves only if you move the plan.
Piers, frame, boards
Helical piers torqued to the gauge reading in your file, then the frame at twelve-inch centres and the boards gapped for this valley. The crew that starts is the crew that finishes.
The dusk walkthrough
Lights on, every fastener checked, the care sheet and the lighting schematic filed in your handover book — and the first evening is yours to aim.
Not opinions
The numbers we build to
Depth by frost line, guards by drop height, cantilever by the quarter-span rule. The arithmetic is published before the drawing is, so the deck is never a matter of taste in the parts that hold it up.
Solstice moved our dinner hour two months deeper into the autumn. The pier crew was here for a morning and the garden never knew they had come; the lights come on at the switch by the door as if they had always been there.
Asked at the studio
Helical piers or concrete — which one is under my deck?
Both are right and we sell both honestly. Helical piers torque to a measured capacity with no cure days and no spoil on the garden, at roughly twenty dollars a pier more; poured sono-tubes win on price for flat, open builds. The soil decides, and the studio visit tells you which before you care.
How far can the deck float past its posts?
A quarter of the back-span, and never more than 24 inches on residential 2×10 joists — the rule every inspector in the county checks against. The floating look is a framing decision, not a style one; a builder who cantilevers further is borrowing stiffness from your guardrail.
Do rails have to be 36 inches?
Wherever the walking surface sits more than 30 inches above grade, yes — a 36-inch guard minimum in this code cycle, with baluster gaps a four-inch sphere cannot pass. The day the deck serves the public it wants 42, and we draw it that way from the start if that is the plan.
What does lighting really add?
Between nine hundred and eighteen hundred dollars on most builds — post caps, a rail strip and the stair run, wired to a switch by the door before the boards go down. It is the cheapest hour of evening you will ever buy.
Draw the evening with us.
One studio visit, one drawing with your table on it, one fixed number — usually inside a week of the first call. Evenings and Saturdays, all season.