Deck Replacement in Clifton, OH

Clifton (ZIP 45220) has some of the tallest domestic elevations in the city: long windows, high sills, deep heads, and a lot of wall between them. A deck goes in front of all that, and the thing that decides whether it looks built with the house or bolted onto it is not the board or the rail. It is where two horizontal lines land.

A deck gives the back of a house two strong horizontals it did not have: the surface, and the top of the guard about three feet above it. The eye reads those against whatever else is horizontal on that wall, which is the window sills and the door head. When the rail cap runs across the middle of a tall window it cuts the opening in half and the whole elevation reads as obstructed. When it sits just under a sill, or lines through with a door head, it reads as though somebody designed it. The difference between those two is often four inches of deck height.

So the elevation gets drawn before the plan does. We measure the sills, the heads and the string course if there is one, put the deck level and the rail cap on that drawing as lines, and move them until they land somewhere deliberate. Sometimes that means dropping the deck a step below the threshold and taking a riser at the door. Sometimes it means a lower guard on one run where the drop allows it. It is half an hour of drawing and it is the single cheapest thing that makes a deck look like it belongs to a Clifton house.