Snow Peas - deck idea for snow shoveling

Who the heck shovels off the back deck (unless there is no other way out)? Here, we shovel what we have to in order to get out of the house. The deck is not included in that!

I don't have a deck like that but I shovel off our back porch for the dog.  Keeps him from tracking in just that much more crap.

We shoveled our old deck when the snow was heavy/deep because the boards were rotting and I was legit afraid it would fall.

Now that the deck has been replaced, we will shovel it if it's really deep or if we want to use the grill.

We have to shovel off our upper deck because of the amount of snow that comes off our roofs. It was originally just an awning covering a lower deck, but our first winter here we got something like 34’ (yes, feet!) over the course of the winter. It completely snapped the headers of the awning and caused about $75k worth of damage to the exterior of our house.

We replaced it with a deck instead of an awning so that it can be shoveled regularly. (And engineered the hell out of it, too.)

Here’s why you might want to reconsider. When the cement block foundation on the lake cabin failed in 2008, MIL had the cabin lifted and added a walkout basement. There was a patio door in the addition they had initially added in the 70’s that was supposed to go out to a small 4’ high deck, but they never did add one. After the lift was done, she added the deck there because now there was about a 15’ drop.

Ten years later, after DH and I inherited the cabin, we discovered that when that deck was added, the flashing had been cut at the base instead of tucked up and under the siding. So all that snow that would pile up on that deck year after year (because it was unable to be insulated, it was only a seasonal use place, we didn’t even go there in the winter), had been melting and going down inside the wall. For TEN YEARS. When we went to do our remodel, our contractor took off that deck and discovered that the entire wall below it was completely rotted out and was full of black mold. 🤢

It was so badly rotted that it was lucky we never really used that deck because it could have collapsed. We never had any reason to suspect that there was anything wrong. Needless to say, even though we know our current cabin and deck are built to proper building codes, we don’t leave a huge amount of snow to pile up, especially against any of the exterior walls.

Holy hell! You can be the exception lol.