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Has anyone here used the Lowe’s Deck Designer website and use those plans to build their deck from scratch?
I’m looking to add a deck to my house (17’x20’ floating deck off the back of my house) and while I’m handy and know my way around the lumber yard, I’ve never tackled a job quite this large before. I’m better if I can follow directions/look at plans than just winging it and “knowing what to look for” in a big job like this.
Also, how accurate is the product list and prices it spits out? I have a hard time wrapping my head around that a 17x20 composite deck/railings is $12,000 more than a pressure treated deck/railings. Also sometimes the software gives a different price despite not making any design or material changes (maybe that’s why my confidence in this software isn’t 100%!).
I recently designed a deck using Lowes' deck designer tool on their website. It creates a nice 3-D image of the deck, comes up with a list of the materials and hardware needed, and gives you some basic measurements to work from. The problem is now that the lumber is at my house there are a number of things that seem off and I don't think it's human error (which would be totally understandable as people make mistakes). I think the software generates inconsistencies. I should have checked the materials list it generated for me better because even though I selected 2x10s for my beam size I don't have enough of them. The weird thing is that I have just enough extra 2 x 12s to use for the beams instead. So the computer generated materials list doesn't give me enough 2 x 10s even though on the plan overview it specifically says that my beams are 2 x 10s. This just throws off a few measurements and I would totally understand if this was human error but this deck was designed using the program on their website. If that is the case then maybe others have run into the same problem of that website generating a materials list that does not completely match they deck they designed. Or maybe I'm just an idiot and I'm overlooking something.
My deck is made from 4x4. Code in my city appears to be 6x6. Indeed, appears to be the standard. Why does Lowe's not warn that using 4x4 will get your deck rejected by inspectors after it's built?
Caveat emptor my friend.
I used a different site to design my deck. According to their list of materials i needed 96 #60 bags of concrete. I used 16.
So i understand where you're coming from.
For a free web app, it's really not bad at all. https://deckdesigner.lowes.com/
I'm not a professional so maybe this is not something a pro would use, but I'm happy with the results I got. See photo.