As the son of a contractor and with an education in engineering I can see how Decka came to be. After college I started building docks with my father, which led to decks, which led to a business building decks & docks.

While building my first few decks I quickly realized creating plans and submitting permits is quite the task. And one I needed to outsource as I was not qualified to create plans, nor did I want to be. I wanted to follow plans created for me, to code, and build without having to worry if I'm building this deck correctly.

I hired a solo designer, used plans clients already had done, and tried two separate design firms. All drawings were created by qualified designers and almost all of them passed municipal review on the first shot. Every one of those jobs I found myself wondering if I'm building this damn deck correctly. Every one of those jobs I had to reach out to others or make assumptions because the plans I was given just didn't cover the 15% of structural detail that were unique to my projects.

Some were better than others, but it's clear that the incentives for making good deck drawings stop at passing municipal review. Each drawing was lacking and confusing. They had little to no thought put into them on the specifics of the project because when anything strayed from the norm, which it almost always does, the details were vague, nonexistent, or, and this happened more than once, straight up false. The drawings would have passed initial review, but without doing my own due diligence I definitely would have built multiple decks that either would have not passed inspection, or if they did, shouldn't have.