Our railingless deck
I am sure it is a common predicament in designy households. A vision appears: the Perfect Bed. Or: the Ideal Coffee Table. Or, in our case: the Best Deck Railing. Unable to leave well enough alone, we have the good-bad luck of knowing how things can be made. We have the resources to design and build our concepts. And we have the stubborn and peculiar desire to see our project through on our terms.
Our deck was undertaken in the summer of 2008. We had contractors come in and repair the cantilevers, then Ted spent a few beautiful days laying the deck with some lovely wood. Next came the railing. Our old railing was no longer code-compliant, and with small children we really do care about safety and such. Besides, it looked shoddy compared to the beautiful new deck. We considered our options: cable railing, pre-fabbed glass or steel panels, wood.
We are still considering our options, having lost a full summer of deck dining in the process. Shall we anodize? Powder coat? How about electric blue? Harvest gold? Dark gray ano? Cor-ten steel? Tis a lovely problem to have, but I wonder sometimes what is wrong with us that we can’t just order up and have a serviceable railing.
What would we “sacrifice” by going with a standard option, and is it worth the time lost? It is the designer’s quandary. I want to know what hang ups other designers have had.
Can totally relate. Decisions made on a dime for clients but analysis paralysis on the homefront. Most of the time just too burnt out at the end of the day solving everyone else’s riddles to tackle my own. Sometimes I think it might be easier to hire someone else to just do it!
I am afraid my fiance and I are in the same boat. We really like modern, but is cable the only thing out there? We have just started our home remodel and do not know where to even begin to start looking.
We have done a lot of looking and we keep coming back to cable or custom steel. We considered glass panels, which can sometimes look okay, but they’d be a pain to keep clean under a bunch of cedar trees. Cable looks good in many places, but it is starting to feel dated and it isn’t cheap enough to make the decision easily. There are some really nice semi-custom options, but they are not cheap. We are leaning toward custom fabricated steel panels which will be powder coated then bolted together on site. It will be done by summer, really! Good luck!
Actually. I should be up front. We just purchased a house in September. we have demoed the deck, gutted the basement. We will be tearing out the whole upstairs completely here in the spring. I guess you could say we are going to be starting from scratch. If anybody has any good websites for any type interesting stuff, I wouldn’t mind browsing….
Have a good day all and I will update the remodel if anything interesting happens.