Bellingham gets close to three feet of rain in an average year, and most of it falls in the months when nobody is looking at their deck. Then July arrives, the clouds lift off Bellingham Bay, and everyone in town wants to be outside at once. A deck here has to survive eight soggy months to earn four spectacular ones — and that is a genuine engineering problem, not a marketing line.
Decks Designed for a City That Lives Outside in Summer
We build and replace decks all over town: view platforms on South Hill catching the sunset over Lummi Island, family decks behind Sunnyland and Columbia craftsman homes, and big entertaining decks near Lake Padden and Whatcom Falls Park where the trees never stop dropping needles. Shade and organic debris are the two things that kill Bellingham decks early, because both hold moisture against wood long after the rain stops.
That is why we spend as much effort on what you cannot see as what you can. Ledger flashing is the number-one failure point we find on older Bellingham decks — a rotted ledger connection is how decks separate from houses — so ours get proper flashing, standoff details, and structural fasteners rather than the lag-bolts-through-siding shortcut common in decks built decades ago.
Cedar or Composite?
Both work here, honestly. Western red cedar looks at home behind a 1920s craftsman and takes stain beautifully, but it wants maintenance. Modern composite and PVC decking shrugs off the moss and algae that our marine climate grows on every horizontal surface, which is why it has become our most-requested surface for shaded lots. We will walk you through the real trade-offs, not a brochure.