Multi-Level Decks in Park Hills, KY

Park Hills (ZIP 41011) has a lot of houses sitting well up off their own ground, and a deck at the back door on one of those is a long way from the grass. That distance is usually treated as a stair problem. It is more useful as a design one.

A flight cannot run indefinitely without a break in it. Past a certain rise the stair needs an intermediate landing, and that landing is already a platform: its own posts, its own footings, its own frame, sitting halfway between the deck and the yard. Built to the minimum it is a place to turn around on. Built four or five feet deeper it is a second level, and the extra cost is decking, a few more feet of beam and a slightly bigger hole in two places, because the structure was going in either way.

What that gets you is the part people like most about a tall deck. The upper platform is level with the kitchen and it is where the table goes. The middle one is close enough to the yard to hear somebody in it, low enough that the guard stops blocking the view out, and it is the shaded half on an afternoon when the top is not. It also breaks the descent into two short flights instead of one long one, which is what keeps the climb back up from being the reason nobody goes down.

So the flight gets designed before it gets drawn. We work out where the break has to fall on your rise, then ask how much wider that platform wants to be, and price the two versions next to each other so the choice is a real one.