Deck Construction in Delhi Hills, OH

Delhi Hills (ZIP 45233) sits on the west-side ridge above the river. The yards up here are cut into the slope, and a good number of them are held in place by a retaining wall somebody built decades ago.

A wall like that is holding a fixed amount of soil and it was sized for that job alone. Deck footings placed behind it add load it never accounted for, and that is what starts an old wall leaning. So we work out what is holding the yard up before a post goes anywhere. There are two ways through it and both are ordinary work: the footings go deep enough that their load passes below the wall entirely, or the deck sits far enough back that the wall never feels it. Where the lot is too tight for either, the deck stands on its own line of posts out in front of the wall and the wall carries nothing new at all.

The slope also decides the shape. A yard cut into a hill is usually two or three flat terraces with a drop between them, and a single big rectangle only ever fits one of them. A deck that steps down with the terraces uses the whole yard and puts a level surface at each height, which is the thing these lots do not otherwise have. The view west is the other reason to build up here, so we set the guard and the beam line to keep the river side of the deck open.