Timber Decking in Melbourne

Brisk Landscaping builds timber decking in Melbourne for homes across the western, eastern and south-eastern suburbs.

Certified, licensed, insured, fifteen years in. The figure you get after the site visit is the figure you pay.

Single-level backyard decks, raised decks, multi-level builds on sloping blocks. We do the ground works and the substructure in-house rather than subbing out the part that decides whether the thing lasts.

Merbau does most of the work in this city. Dense, hard-wearing, and it copes with the way Melbourne swings from soaked to bone dry and back again within a fortnight. That’s why it’s such a popular choice for timber decking in Melbourne.

Spotted Gum is the other common pick, usually chosen on looks. Its colour runs anywhere from pale honey through to deep chocolate, sometimes within a single board, so no two Spotted Gum decks come out looking the same. Some people love that. A few find it too busy and go back to Merbau. Other hardwoods are worth considering depending on where the deck sits and what you’re spending, and we’ll bring samples to the consultation. Timber is impossible to judge off a screen.

$180 to $450 per square metre. The board you choose decides most of where you land in that range.

Other things push it around. Sloping sites need excavating or filling before a single post goes in. Raised decks carry more structure underneath, plus stairs and a balustrade. Angled and multi-level board patterns look better and waste more material. And if there’s no side gate wide enough to get a machine through, the ground works happen with shovels, which costs roughly what you’d expect it to.

We price it properly after seeing the site. Anyone quoting a deck over the phone is guessing.

Ten to twenty years, which sounds unhelpfully vague until you realise the number is decided almost entirely by whether anyone maintains it.

Maintenance means washing it down, then sanding, sealing and staining on a cycle, and swapping out the occasional board or joist as things age. Let that slide for a few years and you’ll be at the bottom of the range, with boards cupping and the surface going grey and splintery underfoot. Stay on top of it and twenty years is genuinely achievable.

Some people quite enjoy that weekend. Plenty don’t. If you’re in the second group, say so at the consultation and we’ll price composite alongside the timber so you can compare the two honestly. We build both and we’re not precious about which you pick.

This is where the money quietly goes, and it’s where cheaper quotes find their savings.

For timber decking in Melbourne, we clear and level the site first, with weed matting down before anything gets built over the top. The frame goes in as metal or treated timber, set out and then checked by measuring both diagonals. Those two measurements have to match. When they don’t, you see it in every board laid afterwards, running progressively further out of parallel as you work across the deck. Joists sit at 300 to 400mm centres, fixed with galvanised screws or nails.

None of it is visible once the boards go down. That’s rather the point of doing it properly.

The site visit comes first, where we look at levels, access, ground conditions and what you actually want the deck to do. A deck built for a barbecue and eight people is a different structure to one built for a couple of chairs and a coffee.

From there we draw a design specific to your block, specify the timber, and itemise the quote so you can see exactly what you’re paying for and where. Then we build it, same crew from ground works through to the fascia boards.

Recent decks in Point Cook, Bentleigh, Doncaster, Elsternwick, Mernda and Eynesbury. There are before-and-after shots in the gallery, which will tell you more about our finish quality than anything written on this page.

Call 1300 027 475 or email info@brisklandscaping.com.au and we’ll come out and measure up for your timber decking in Melbourne. No charge for the visit and no obligation once we’ve been.