Outdoor and grounds questions

The test is the frame. If the joists, beams, posts and ledger are sound, failed boards and a wobbly railing are a repair, and it is a fraction of the cost of rebuilding. If the frame is failing, no amount of new decking fixes it and putting fresh boards on it is money you will spend twice. Our survey tells you which in writing, and we quote a good many repairs for people who arrived expecting to be told they needed a rebuild.

The ledger connection where the deck attaches to the house, and it is invisible once built. It has to be through-bolted or fixed with structural screws into the rim joist, never nailed, and it has to be flashed so water running down the wall goes over it rather than behind it. An unflashed ledger rots the rim joist of your house, not just the deck, and by then it is a structural repair. It is the single most common point of catastrophic deck failure.

Over about fifteen years, usually yes. Composite costs roughly three times pressure-treated in material and needs essentially no refinishing, where pressure-treated needs sealing every couple of years and in this climate that is a real commitment. Two honest caveats: composite gets noticeably hot underfoot in full Triangle sun, and the frame underneath is still timber, so the structure still ages even when the surface does not.

Because timber has to be dry before sealing, and after washing that is typically two to three days in Triangle humidity. Sealing damp timber traps the moisture and the coating fails within a season, so the waiting is the job rather than a delay. Most of the labour is removing what is already there: a film-forming solid stain peels rather than fades and every flake has to come off before anything new goes on.

No, and nobody should. Composite is not refinished: it does not take a stain and it does not need one. If someone has offered to reseal your composite deck they are selling you something that will not adhere. What composite decks do occasionally need is board replacement after impact damage, fastener correction and railing repair, all of which we do.

Almost always the base, which is the part you never see and the part that decides whether the patio is still flat in ten years. Piedmont clay holds water, swells when saturated and shrinks hard in an August drought. A patio laid on a shallow bed of sand over clay will dip, pool water in the dips, and open its joints through freeze-thaw. Doing it properly means excavating deeper than looks necessary and compacting aggregate in lifts, and most of the labour in an honest quote is that work.

Not if it is built with fall away from the building, which every patio we build is. A patio is an impermeable surface, so every square foot sheds water that used to soak in, and if the fall runs toward the house you have built a device for delivering rain to your foundation. Where a site cannot achieve fall by grading alone we include a drainage detail, a channel drain at the house edge or a French drain to daylight, and it is in the quote rather than discovered later.

No, it is efflorescence, which is salts migrating out of the concrete. It is normal on new concrete pavers, it weathers off over a season or two, and it is not covered as a defect because it is a material property rather than a fault. Clay brick does not do it, and natural stone rarely does, which is one small reason people choose them.

Only once we know the old positions were right. Fencing generates more disputes than any other outdoor work, and almost all of them trace to nobody checking the boundary. Old fences were frequently built a foot inside the line or a foot over it, and rebuilding on the same posts perpetuates whichever it was. The plot survey is the record. If you do not have one and the line is not obvious, you need a surveyor before you need us, because we do not establish boundaries and will not guess at one.

The posts, essentially always, and rarely the panels. In Piedmont clay a post has to go below the frost line and resist the leverage of a tall privacy panel acting as a sail in a storm. Set too shallow and clay that swells and shrinks seasonally will heave and lean it. Corner and gate posts take loads the line posts do not, so they need to be larger, deeper and braced. A gate that drops within a year is a gate post treated like a line post.

No. The program covers treatments, aeration and overseeding across seven visits a year; the mowing is yours or your mowing service's. There is a practical reason as well as a commercial one: treatments work best on a lawn mowed two to three days before rather than on the day, and coordinating that is easier when the two are separate.

You can, but you will miss the most valuable application of the year. The February visit puts down pre-emergent, and crabgrass is either stopped before it germinates or it is not stopped at all. By the time you can see it in June the window has closed until next year. A program starting in April is a program missing its most important visit, and we will tell you that rather than take the money quietly.

Because Triangle oaks do not finish dropping until well into November, and some hold leaves into December. Willow oaks and pin oaks, planted through half the older neighbourhoods around Raleigh, are among the last to go, and pines drop needles on their own schedule entirely. A cleanup booked for early October is one you will need again a fortnight later. If you want the lawn clear for a specific event we will schedule an extra visit rather than move your included one.

Yes, and it is the one genuinely time-critical thing we do outdoors. Water left in the lines and in the backflow preventer through a Triangle cold snap freezes, expands and splits things, and the backflow preventer is the expensive casualty because it is brass, above ground, and a regulated fitting that has to be replaced like for like and retested. Winterisation takes under an hour, and freeze damage to a system we were not asked to winterise is not covered by any warranty.