Ryan Mattison

Can You Build a Deck in Boston During Winter? Ask a Boston homeowner in late October whether a deck can go up in winter, and you will usually get two confident answers: yes, builders work all year, and no, the ground is frozen. Both answers miss the useful part. In Greater Boston, winter deck work

This guide collects our six articles for planning and caring for a deck and porch through a Boston winter, in reading order: planning and building a deck, fall prep and snow-season care, and the porch piece. Each section below is a summary of the full article it links to. Before you build: permits, materials, and

Every October, the same question starts coming up in Greater Boston: now that the screens are coming down and the porch furniture is going into storage, can the three-season porch earn its keep through winter? The honest answer depends on which winter you mean. October and April? Absolutely — that’s what the room was built

Every Boston winter brings the same question from homeowners: with the driveway to shovel and the sidewalk to clear, does the deck really need clearing too — and when it ices over, what’s actually safe to put down on it? The short answers: yes, clearing is worth it, and de-icing is where a lot of

The ledger — the board that ties your deck to the house — is the joint where decks most often fail. Sometimes the failure is structural: the connection pulls away from the wall. Sometimes it’s water: the joint was never flashed properly, and the house’s rim joist rots from the inside out. Here’s what many […]

A deck in New England lives two lives: the summer one you picture when you sign the contract, and the winter one that actually decides how long it lasts. Between November and April, deck boards in Greater Boston go through repeated freeze-thaw cycles, sit under snow that melts and refreezes, and get scraped, salted, and

A wood deck in Greater Boston doesn’t just sit through winter — it gets worked over by it. The freeze-thaw cycling we get from December into March is what ages a deck fastest: water soaks in, freezes, expands, and pries at boards, fasteners, and joints a little more with every cycle. The best time to

Newton runs deck permits through its Inspectional Services Department, all online. When the city requires a permit, where to apply, and what to have ready.