Deck & Porch Building in Alpharetta, GA

Deck & Porch Building for Alpharetta homes

The bulk of Alpharetta's houses went up between the early 1980s and the early 2000s. Windward, the Mobil-developed lake community that began selling in 1983, is the clearest example: 44 neighborhoods in a variety of styles around Lake Windward, many on sloped lots with full daylight basements, some still unfinished and stubbed for a bath. Fronts tend to be brick or stone, with hardboard, cedar or early fiber-cement lap on the sides and rear, and some later homes in the area were clad in synthetic or three-coat stucco. Older still is Alpharetta Estates, built roughly 1972 to 1982 on large wooded lots near downtown, where the ranches carry four or five decades of wear. Downtown keeps a handful of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century homes, from Greek Revival to the 1912 Queen Anne Mansell House, with clapboard and old plaster. The newest stock is the townhome and condo infill around Avalon and City Center, where the work is mostly interior: paint, flooring and finish upgrades.

Areas we work in Alpharetta

• Windward
• The Spinnakers at Windward
• Alpharetta Estates
• Downtown Alpharetta
• Avalon

Near Avalon, Wills Park, Big Creek Greenway and across the rest of Alpharetta.

Deck & Porch Building on Alpharetta houses

Decks in Alpharetta are often tall. On the sloped lots around Lake Windward and through the wooded subdivisions of the 1980s and 90s, the main-floor deck sits a full story above the daylight basement, on long posts, with stairs dropping down to the yard. Many of the originals from that era are pressure-treated pine that has been patched and restained for decades, and the question is often whether to rebuild in place or design a two-level deck with a covered porch below. In Alpharetta Estates the ranches sit lower, so decks and screened porches are closer to the ground. New townhomes downtown usually have small balconies or patios rather than a deck.

What usually gets missed

On a tall deck the part that matters is where it meets the house. Older decks were often nailed to the rim joist without proper flashing, and water running behind the ledger rots the band board of the house itself. We remove a board near the ledger and probe the rim joist before deciding whether the deck can be rebuilt on the same line. Posts that sit directly in soil or concrete get checked at the base too.