NoDa Deck & Porch Builder

NoDa's housing stock is mostly early-1900s mill housing built for the Highland Park and Mercury mill workers, with a growing layer of modern infill dropped onto the same narrow lots. The old houses sit close to the street with deep, skinny back yards, so the rear deck is usually long and narrow rather than wide — and the proportions matter here as much as the square footage does.

Front porches are part of what NoDa looks like, and porch repair and rebuild is a real share of what we do in this neighborhood. Matching column proportion, rail height, and board width to a 1910 bungalow is a different exercise from building new construction. Get it wrong and the house reads as off from the sidewalk even when the carpentry underneath is sound.

Access is the practical constraint nobody expects. Many NoDa lots are served by alleys or have essentially no side-yard clearance, so material has to come through the house or down a narrow gap between structures. We plan staging and delivery before the build starts, because on a 36th Street lot there is nowhere to park a lift or a dumpster without having thought about it first.

The newer infill construction on these lots has the opposite profile — modern framing and generous ceiling height, but a small footprint with neighbors close on both sides. Screened rooms and covered decks do particularly well there. They add usable season without adding sightlines straight into the yard next door, which on a NoDa lot is ten feet away.