Elevate Your Outdoor Living: Premier Deck Building in Northeast Wisconsin

It depends entirely on material. Pressure-treated pine and cedar need cleaning and re-sealing or staining every one to three years — Wisconsin winters are hard on wood, and skipping it leads to graying, splintering, and cracking. Composite needs washing a couple times a season and little else. Either way, we'll walk you through care for your specific deck at the final walkthrough and recommend an annual look at fasteners, railings, and the ledger connection.

Yes, more often than people assume. Framing and decking continue in cold weather; the limiting factor is footings, since we can't dig once the ground is deeply frozen. The bigger reason to talk to us in winter is scheduling — spring is when everyone calls, and homeowners who plan in January are the ones using their deck by Memorial Day rather than August.

Almost always, yes, and we handle it. Wisconsin's Uniform Dwelling Code governs decks attached to homes and any deck serving an exit, covering footings, frost depth, load, stairs, handrails, guards, and decay protection. Some municipalities exempt small ground-level decks, but the thresholds vary and getting it wrong creates problems when you sell. We pull permits in our name and coordinate inspections.

Most deck failures are ledger failures — the connection where the deck attaches to the house. Done poorly, it pulls away under load, which is how collapses happen, and it's the single most common defect we find on older decks. We attach ledgers with properly sized structural fasteners into solid framing, and we flash the connection so water can't get behind it and rot the rim joist. Beyond that: footings below frost depth, correctly sized beams and joists for the span, proper post-to-beam connections, and code-compliant guards and stairs. Everything is inspected before we close it up.