Custom Decks in California, OH

Walk a few hundred feet in California (ZIP 45230) and you pass painted frame, red brick and buff stone. There is no single right color for a built-in bench on a street like that. Households here get to choose, and the choice sits between two good answers that point opposite ways.

Seating and storage built into the floor save a household from buying outdoor furniture twice. The bench is already the right length, the lid box is already the right depth, and neither blows over in March. The one decision left is how they should look beside the building they stand against.

Match the floor and the joinery disappears. A bench clad in the deck boards, laid the same way and eased at the same edges, reads as the floor folding up into a seat. That keeps a small deck calm. Take a color off the house and the bench reads as furniture. A painted box in the trim color, a darker board on top, or a stone slab on a counter ties the deck to the building. On red brick, a warm top over a gray floor is a quiet way to do it.

The choice gets made outdoors with samples in hand. We hold full length boards and stain cards against the house and against the deck at the hours you are actually out there. A color read indoors under a bulb is a different color at six on an August evening. Two more things get checked before an order goes in. How it looks wet, since rain darkens everything, and how the pair will read after a season. Where a household cannot settle it, we put the floor color on the big surfaces and a house color on the lid.