Sehome is a neighborhood built on a hill, and its decks show it. Wedged between downtown Bellingham and the Western Washington University campus, with the 180-acre Sehome Hill Arboretum rising behind it, this is a place where a backyard is often a slope and the deck is the only truly flat outdoor space a house has. Get the deck right and you gain a room with a view over the rooftops toward Bellingham Bay. Get it wrong and you have a wobbly platform on stilts.
Building Decks on Sehome's Slopes
Elevated and hillside decks are structural projects first and carpentry projects second. Many of the decks we replace in Sehome were built decades ago on undersized posts with minimal bracing, and on a slope every weakness is amplified — footings creep, tall posts rack, and railings loosen exactly where a fall would matter most. Our hillside builds start below grade: engineered footings placed for the slope, ground-contact-rated posts on standoff hardware, and diagonal bracing that makes a tall deck feel planted.
Then there is the arboretum effect. Sehome's tree cover is glorious and merciless — needles, cones, and deep shade keep deck surfaces damp for months, and moss films anything horizontal by midwinter. On shaded lots we usually recommend capped composite decking with hidden fasteners; it sheds the green film with a rinse instead of demanding an annual scrub-and-stain campaign. On the sunnier streets lower in the neighborhood, cedar remains a handsome, budget-friendlier option.