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 inspection rather than assumption. 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.

Historic district review

Gainesville has local historic districts, and exterior work on a property inside one typically goes through a design review process in addition to the building permit. If your house is in or near the Duckpond or Pleasant Street, the city’s historic preservation staff are the people to talk to before drawings are finalised rather than after. It is a straightforward step when it happens at the right point in the project.

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.