Alabama Hill Deck Builders — Bellingham, WA

Alabama Hill earns its views. From the streets climbing east off Alabama Street, homes look out over Bellingham Bay, the city below, and on clear evenings a sunset over the San Juans that no landscaping could compete with. The neighborhood's split-levels and daylight ramblers, most dating from the 1960s and 1970s, were built to face that view, and nearly all of them were built with a deck to enjoy it from. Fifty years later, many of those original decks are the most dangerous structure on the property.

Sloped Lots Raise the Stakes

A deck on flat ground that fails drops you a foot. A deck on an Alabama Hill view lot can be eight, twelve, or more feet above a downhill slope, which makes the structure underneath a genuine safety matter. The original decks we inspect here often share the same defects: ledger boards nailed rather than bolted to the house, posts resting on small pads or bare soil that has crept downhill over the decades, and rusted hangers hidden behind fascia boards. Bellingham's wet season accelerates all of it, because hillside lots shed groundwater past post footings for months at a time.

When Alpine Exteriors rebuilds a deck on the hill, the structure is engineered for the site: footings sized for the slope, posts and beams dimensioned for the height, and lateral bracing so the deck feels solid underfoot even with a crowd on it.

Designing for the View

The whole point of a deck up here is what you can see from it, so our designs protect the sightline.

• Cable or glass railings that meet code without striping the bay view behind pickets
• Capped composite decking in tones that handle west-facing sun without fading or annual sealing
• Multi-level layouts that step down the slope and turn unusable hillside into living space
• Integrated lighting on stairs and rails for the evenings the deck exists for

Honest Assessments of Existing Decks

Sometimes the framing on a 1970s deck is genuinely sound and only the surface, rails, and flashing need replacement. We tell you either way. After 25 years building exteriors in this county, we have learned that homeowners remember honesty longer than they remember a sales pitch.

From Estimate to Warranty

We start with a free on-site estimate: we crawl under the existing deck, evaluate the slope and drainage, and come back with a design and a firm price. Our crews have completed more than 2,000 projects across Whatcom County and the surrounding region, a good share of them on hillside lots exactly like these. And because an elevated deck must stay safe for decades, not just through the punch-list walk, every deck we build carries our 25-year workmanship warranty. If your Alabama Hill deck flexes, leans, or simply does not deserve its view anymore, we would like to see it.