Deck Builder in Austell, GA

8,447 people, and a city line that crosses a county line

Austell holds 3,176 homes, and the people living in 1,959 of them own the place. Mableton, four miles east, has nearly ten times as many homes.

The city limits also refuse to stop where the county does. About 97 percent of Austell is Cobb and the last 3 percent is Douglas.

If you would rather skip straight to your own lot, send us a few photos and the measurements.

1993, and the part of a deck that gives out first

1993 is the year that splits the houses in Austell in half.

A deck framed alongside one of those houses is past its thirtieth summer, and by now the fasteners and the post bases have taken more weather than the boards have. Steel in contact with wet lumber is on a shorter clock than the lumber is.

So the first thing we do on a deck this age is get underneath it, because the surface tells you almost nothing. A frame that's still square carries new boards for another twenty years. A ledger that has been quietly wet for most of thirty years doesn't, whatever the top of it looks like.

Repair and replacement starts with that call. How a deck gets framed is the structural half, and railings, stairs and the underside is the rest of it.

3,176 homes, and the fence market that size makes

At 3,176 homes, Austell is a small enough fence market that one crew sees most of it in a season.

That size shows up in the work. Runs here are short enough that a single style carries the whole yard, so the decision is made once instead of compromised in three places, and the gate count matters more than the run length does. Materials, and what each one asks of you five years in, are on the fence company page.

1,959 households own the roof over them

That's 64.6 percent of the occupied homes here.

Two thirds of the town owns, not rents, so a pergola or a covered patio gets built for whoever will be sitting under it, not for the next owner.

It also means fewer than two thousand such households in the whole city, which isn't a market anybody wins on volume. We would rather do six of these a year properly in Austell than sixty badly anywhere.

Perkerson Lake, and nothing else inside the line

One named water sits inside the Austell city limits, and Perkerson Lake is a small one.

Size isn't what makes standing water a problem in a back yard. Stillness is, and this is still.

Screening a porch is what takes the evening back from it. How far to take the enclosure is the real decision, and the screened porch page sets out what each level gives up in breeze and buys back in months.

141 feet of vertical, top to bottom

The whole of Austell fits inside 141 feet, from a low of 873 to a high of 1,014. Mableton, in the same county, spreads 315.

Ground that gentle doesn't generate much wall work, and what it does generate is short.

A single low run holds an edge where the lawn drops away, so the flat part stops migrating downhill. Everything taller is on the retaining wall page.

Sweetwater Creek and four more

Five named streams run through Austell: Buttermilk, Noses, Olley, Powder Springs and Sweetwater.

Three of the five also run through Marietta and Powder Springs before they get here, so the same water is being handed between three towns.

Water arriving from somebody else's ground doesn't care what you paved.

We lay out an Austell patio, walkway or run of steps around where the yard sits in that chain, which is a separate question from how much fall the surface itself carries.

A fire pit that belongs to the patio it sits in

The ring is the easy part. What decides whether a fire pit looks built or looks bought is whether it shares a material with the surface around it.

Cut it from the same paver as the patio and it reads as part of the floor. Build it out of something else and it becomes the object everybody looks at, which is a fine choice as long as it was a choice.

Either way it's hardscape and we set it as hardscape. The fire pit guide is where the shapes get compared.

How an Austell job gets scheduled

Half the run down here is surface road, which means an Austell day starts earlier than a Bartow County day does and ends later.

We would rather give you a date two weeks out and keep it than promise you a Thursday and spend the morning on US 41.

Cobb County carries this page and six more, of which Mableton and Powder Springs are the near neighbors, and the gallery is where you can see how our work turns out.

Further reading

• how big a deck actually needs to be
• keeping a wood fence alive in Georgia