Deck Builder in Cumming, GA

A long way out, and worked in already

8,469 people live in Cumming, 57.7 road miles from us, and nobody should pretend that's a quick stop. We come anyway. There are decks in this town we built and decks in it we put right, and a few of those decks are on the gallery. Cumming is the only town we cover in Forsyth County. If writing it down is easier than a call, send it over.

A nineties house, and a deck that has done thirty summers

Most Cumming houses went up in the nineties, 1998 sitting at the middle of them, and a deck framed alongside one of those has taken close to thirty Georgia summers. Framing that age is often sound long after the boards give up, so both routes stay open. How a deck gets built is one page, the composite surface question another, repair and replacement the third.

2,879 homes inside a tight city line

Cumming is a small town and the whole of it comes to 2,879 homes, so a fence here is sized to the lot it sits on, not to a subdivision phase. Run length, corner count and where the gates want to sit come off a walk around your own line, and what each material does over time sits with the fencing service.

Rented homes are the majority, 1,408 to 1,301

Forty-eight percent of Cumming households own the home they live in, so renters hold the slight edge inside the city line. That changes how many yards we're talking about, not whether there's work in them. A patio cover or a pergola is something 1,301 households here are placed to buy, and those are the yards we're talking to.

Lake Alice, and how little of it there's

The only still water inside Cumming is Lake Alice, and it covers a hundredth of a square mile. That's a pond. It sets the evening for the streets backing onto it and very little past them, so a screened porch is a block by block decision here, not a town wide one. Near the water, screen buys back the hours after dark. Away from it, the case is shade and August rain.

Nothing here sits below 1,071 feet

The floor inside the boundary is 1,071 feet and the ceiling is 1,346, so 275 feet of change lands on ground that was high to start with. A yard cut into a slope like that has something above it and something below it at once. A retaining wall here holds fill on one face and takes water off the hill on the other. The second job is the one that gets skipped.

Kelly Mill Creek and Sawnee Creek

Four named streams run inside the city line, Kelly Mill Creek and Sawnee Creek among them. High ground sheds fast, so a new slab or a run of pavers hands more water to a channel that's already carrying plenty. Laying a patio, a walkway or the steps between them starts with where the fall goes and what happens at the edges.

What a fire pit wants under it

Set one straight on the grass and it sinks, tilts and burns a ring around itself by the second summer. Set it on a base laid for the purpose and it stays where you put it, which is the whole difference between a fire pit and a pile of blocks. Building that base is hardscape, and the shapes are argued out in the fire pit guide.

Further reading

• deck layouts, extensions and second levels
• fire pit shapes and how they sit in a yard