Wood Decks in Glendale, OH

A timber deck behind a Glendale (ZIP 45246) house stands in one of the most carefully kept villages in the country, and it is seen at close range from the garden. The detail that decides how the floor reads, before anybody notices the species, is the edge of the board.

Treated decking is stocked two ways. Radius-edge, which is the common 5/4 board with both top corners rounded over, and square-edge, which keeps a crisp arris. Radius edge is softer underfoot and on the eye, and it is what most suburban decks are built from. Square edge gives a tighter, more deliberate line that suits the porch and step stock on a period house, and cedar and hardwood are usually milled that way.

The two behave differently with water and with grit. A rounded arris sheds a drop off the corner and gives debris nowhere to lodge, so the gap stays clear with a brush. A square arris holds a bead of water along its length and takes longer to dry, so square-edge boards are laid with a slightly wider gap and get their edges sealed before they go down. On a shaded village lot with a canopy overhead, that gap is worth the extra eighth of an inch.

Sanding is the other half of it. A radius edge softens further with each pass of an orbital sander, and after two or three cycles the rounding is noticeably heavier, which on a period house starts to look suburban. A square edge sands back flat and keeps its line for the life of the boards. Where a household wants the crisp look and the easy drying both, the answer is square-edge stock with the arris eased by hand to about a sixteenth of an inch, which is enough to stop a splinter and too little to read as a rounded board.