Designing a backyard deck for my house
Cosmin Cloud
Designing a backyard deck for my house
Published: 2026-06-16
Words: 3,500<br>Reading Time: 15 minutes
This post details my process for designing a backyard deck for my house. Since this post is about showing<br>how to produce the drawings for the deck in order to get a building permit, in this post I'll skip<br>the details of the building process.
See the links to the drawing exchange format (dxf) files at the bottom.
Buying a house without a deck
When we closed on our house almost 10 years ago, it was missing a deck in the back of the house.<br>I was never told the story of why, but from the looks of it, the old deck that used to be there<br>became dilapidated and instead of replacing it, the previous owner demolished it and left a door<br>on the back of the house that had a 4 foot drop!
Needless to say, this was a problem for anyone else buying the house. My loan originator definitely<br>had a problem with this and said that the door must be permanently shut. Since we really liked<br>the house and I was willing to take it "as-is" and have a deck built later, I asked "What do you mean<br>by permanent?" The answer was, "The door must not be able to be opened without special tools."<br>So, after a bit of brainstorming, with the written permission of the owner, I hired a handyman and<br>had him screw three large wooden screws through the door into the frame, thereby closing it shut<br>so that it cannot be normally opened. This (and a few other fixes, like GFCI outlets) was enough to<br>pass inspection and close on the house and everyone was happy.
Since the house was not in "move-in ready" shape, it took us another 2 months of work before we could<br>move in. The back deck however was a bigger project than we had money or capability do at that time,<br>so our back door remained shut for the next year. Finally, I couldn't wait anymore and<br>searched for a contractor to work on the deck. After a few tries, I didn't find anyone that was<br>giving us a quote we can work with and I decided to take matters into my own hands.
I could design and build my own deck, how hard could it be?
High school skills
In my high school it was required for first year students to take drafting as one of the first year<br>classes. I didn't even know what drafting was, but soon I learned that it meant to make technical<br>drawings on semi-transparent large-format vellum paper. This was paper and pencil drafting, on a<br>drafting desk, all the work was done by hand. If you made a mistake, you erased the lines with an<br>eraser and tried again. If it was too messy, you started all over. You used a mechanical pencil<br>with lead of different softness, with which you had to make lines of different thicknesses and<br>patterns, and you had to use triangles and compasses to make angled lines and circles. We never got<br>far enough to make crazy complicated curves by hand but it would have been fun.
The manual drafting classes spanned the entire first year. Throughout the class students were given various drawings to complete, of increasing difficulty. Looking back, the drawings were not very difficult, but for beginning students with zero drafting skills, it could be a bit of work. However, I really liked it, even though I didn't take it seriously at the time. I didn't always get good grades on my drawings, since I made mistakes, but I did well enough to get a good grade in the class. However, if you're in the engineering mindset, and also in the DIY mindset, this kind of experience is invaluable. I am forever grateful that our high school had this experience. I'm sad to say that our class of the year 2000 was one of the last ones to do drafting by hand, as it was removed from the curriculum during my time in high school.
In my second year of high school we also had shops. I thought it was really cool that my school offered<br>these as classes and I really liked all of them. I took auto shop (learning about internal combustion<br>engines and general car maintenance), wood shop (working with chisels, saws, and drills to make things<br>out of wood), electric shop (making simple electric circuits, such as one where it sounded an alarm when<br>a string was pulled), and finally Computed Aided Drafting (CAD), which was the computer equivalent of the<br>hand drafting class we had the first year.
Overall, I really appreciated how our technical high school balanced the hands on classes with the more academic classes. If I were to do it again, I would do it the same way, and maybe take the classes more seriously so I get more out of them.
All of this to say that I was confident that I could draw up the plans for our deck.
The Plans
So I started to do just that. I spent 3 months working on a deck design on paper. Part of that<br>time was spent re-learning my CAD skills on a new software (I chose LibreCAD<br>because it reminded me of AutoCAD Lite, but there are many options), part of it was measuring out<br>various parts of my house and deciding how big we want parts of the...