Deck Repair in Arlington Heights, OH

Arlington Heights (ZIP 45215) is a compact village where decks tend to be modest and close to the house, which means people look at them from a few feet away every day. At that distance a detail nobody thinks about at the point of purchase becomes the thing you notice: how the long edge of each board is finished.

Decking comes with three common edges and they are not the same product. A square edge gives a crisp shadow line and a gap with parallel sides. An eased edge has a small radius, which softens the line and makes each gap read slightly wider. A bullnose or heavily rounded edge widens it further and rounds the shadow out entirely. Put one board with a different edge into a run of the others and the gap on each side of it is a different shape from every other gap on the deck. It is a small thing and it is exactly the kind of small thing that catches the eye from a kitchen window, because the eye is very good at spotting one interruption in a repeated pattern.

So the edge gets matched along with the width and the thickness, and it is checked with a finger instead of a glance, because an eased edge and a square one look identical from standing height and feel completely different. Where the original profile is no longer made, a square-edge board can be eased on site to match, which is a router pass and worth doing. What we would not do is lay a bullnose board into a square-edge field and let you discover it on a sunny evening.