How to use this gallery
Photographs of finished backyards are good at showing you a feeling and bad at showing you a decision. Almost everything that separates a build that still looks like this in ten years from one that does not is under the boards, behind the wall or below the frost line, and no camera has ever caught it. So it is worth knowing what these images can and cannot settle for you.
What they settle well is proportion and material. Scroll the decks section and you can see how a multi-level layout behaves on a yard that falls away, where stairs want to land so they do not dump you into a slope, and how differently a warm-toned board and a cool grey one read against brick, stucco and stone. The same is true in interlock: pattern and paver size change the apparent size of a patio more than the square footage does, and a border course is the difference between a laid patio and a poured-looking rectangle. In fences, look at the line rather than the panel. A fence that is still straight is a fence whose posts went below the frost line.
What they cannot settle is your yard. Grade, drainage, access and what the ground will bear are decided at your address, not in a photograph, which is why every project is modelled in 3D and AutoCAD against your real measurements first. That drawing is the thing you approve. This page is for narrowing down what you like.
About the photos on this page
We want to be straight with you. This gallery is organised by the type of work, decks, interlock, fences and outdoor structures, and it is not tagged by neighbourhood. So nothing here claims that a particular photo was built at a particular address or in a particular part of Ottawa, and neither does any of our area pages. Attaching a location to a project we cannot verify would be easy and we are not going to do it. If we start tagging projects by area, verified local photos will appear on the pages that cover them, and this line will change.
If you want the reasoning rather than the pictures, the deck materials guideexplains how each board ages through Ottawa’s freeze and thaw, and deck repair is a better starting point than any photograph here if your deck is already standing.
