Deck Builder in Kingston, GA

Under a thousand people, twelve miles up the road

Something under a thousand people live in Kingston, in a little over four hundred homes. In 2020 it was 722 people and 309 homes. Small is the plain truth of it and it's also why we like working here: a town this size is one where the last job you did is the reason you get the next call. For the short version, put a measurement and a picture in front of us.

Deck boards in composite, and the frame they went back onto

We have replaced deck boards in composite in Kingston, so this is a town we have already worked in.

On any deck old enough to need new boards the real question isn't the surface. It's whether the frame under it earns another twenty years, and the only way to answer that's to get beneath it and look at the ledger and the post bases. Composite is less forgiving of a wide joist span than wood is, so on a re-board the spacing has to be checked before anything gets ordered.

Repair and replacement starts at the frame whatever the house dates to. Composite decking is what goes down when the frame is sound, and building new is the answer where the old footprint was never the right one.

Four hundred homes, and runs that end at open ground

Kingston is a small town, something over four hundred homes in total, and fence work at that size isn't subdivision work. Runs come out longer. The gate is more often the one a truck goes through than the one a person does, and a fair share of them finish where the yard ends and open ground begins instead of against anybody else's line. That changes how we brace a corner and where we would rather not put a gate at all. Material against material, that argument belongs on the fence company page.

Close to three quarters of the homes here are owned

Ownership here runs close to three quarters, and that's a few hundred households, not a few thousand. Between those two things the shade conversation goes a house at a time, not a street at a time. Nothing gets copied off the neighbors in a town this size, because there's no run of eight identical back doors to copy from, so we size an open pergola, or a roofed cover instead, to the door it goes over and to the way that one yard sits.

The Etowah runs by, about a mile and a half out

The Etowah is close enough to Kingston to be part of the address and far enough out to be somebody else's back yard. So a screened porch here earns its place on the room it makes, not on the view it frames. Whether that room ends up open to the air, screened, or closed in behind glass is the whole of the decision, and it turns on how many months of the year you want to be able to use it. We would rather you settle that before we set a post, because the three answers don't share a frame.

Bottom ground mostly, with one shoulder climbing

Kingston runs 657 feet at its lowest and 1,003 at its highest, and it averages 725, much nearer the bottom than the top. Most of the town is low, flat ground, and the 346 feet of change belongs to one shoulder climbing at the edge of it. So the wall question here is answered by which side of town the house is on. Across the flat majority a retaining wall is decoration or it's nothing. On the lots that catch the climb it's the first thing we build and the rest of the yard waits on it.

Two Run Creek, and nothing else named

One named channel crosses Kingston and it's Two Run Creek. With only the one line for water to arrive along, most yards here aren't taking delivery of somebody else's. What a patio, a path or a set of steps has to move here is mostly what fell on it, which is the easier version of the problem and still a problem. A surface laid dead flat keeps what lands on it however few creeks the town has, so we build fall into it.

Wood or gas, before anything else about a fire pit

Everything else about a fire pit follows from that one fork, and most people decide it last instead of first.

Wood wants a wide non-combustible surround, somewhere to keep the wood dry and a seating circle set well back. Gas wants a run to the pit and gives you an evening that starts in thirty seconds and ends when you stand up. They're different builds, not the same build with a different burner, and swapping later means opening the hardscape back up.

Either way we build it as hardscape work, and a ring, a square and a sunken pit sit next to each other in the fire pit guide.

The third Bartow County town we cover

Kingston sits between Adairsville and Cartersville, which is to say it sits in the middle of the ground we cover every week anyway. That's worth something on a small job: a half day in Kingston takes almost nothing out of our week in travel, so the jobs that are too small to justify a run to the far side of the metro are exactly the jobs that make sense here. Bartow County is the page above this one, and the gallery carries our finished builds.

Further reading

• composite against wood, and where each one earns it
• making a short, steep back yard usable