Older Gainesville Houses Change What a Deck Can Be

There are effectively two housing stocks in this area for deck purposes, and they produce different projects.

West of town, through Jonesville and Newberry and out around Alachua, most houses are slab-on-grade and recent. The floor sits close to the ground, there is no band joist at deck height, and the deck that results is low, wide, and often freestanding.

The older parts of Gainesville are a different proposition. In the Northeast Gainesville Residential District, generally known as the Duckpond, and in the Pleasant Street Historic District, houses date from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and sit up off the ground. The same is true out in Micanopy, in Archer, and in the older streets of Alachua and Starke.

What real floor height gives you

An elevated house means the deck can sit high off the ground too, which changes what is possible:

• A deck that steps out level with the interior floor rather than dropping a step down to it
• Room for a proper flight of stairs with a landing, placed where people walk
• Space underneath, which can be usable if drainage and airflow are handled
• The option of multiple levels stepping down with the grade rather than one high plane

It also means the deck is high enough that guards are load-bearing safety elements rather than a token edge, and that the stairs are a real part of the project rather than two treads.

What older walls demand

An older house is also a house whose wall assembly deserves opening up rather than assuming. A ledger goes into framing that may be a century old, may have been altered more than once, and may already have taken water from an earlier structure that was attached in the same place.

The right sequence is to open it up and look before pricing the connection. Where what is found is not something to bolt a deck to, a freestanding structure solves it without touching the wall at all.

Porches, not decks

There is a design point here as well as a structural one. The historical outdoor form on these houses is a porch: roofed, often screened, integrated with the elevation of the house rather than added behind it. A covered structure frequently reads better on an older Gainesville house than an open deck does, and in this climate it is also the version that gets used through the summer.

Detailing that suits the house

An older house has proportions in it, and a deck that ignores them looks bolted on from the first day. The things that give it away are usually small: guard balusters at a spacing and a section that has nothing to do with the porch rail on the front of the house, a skirt of lattice where the original elevation has none, posts too slight for the height they are carrying. None of that costs much to get right at the design stage and none of it can be fixed afterwards without taking something apart.

The shade advantage

The older parts of town also have the older trees. A deck under mature canopy in the Duckpond or out toward Millhopper is comfortable on afternoons when an open deck on a cleared lot is not, and that shade is free. The design guide covers reading it, and the tree piece covers building around it.