Raised Deck

A gardener's inspired idea for an easy, accessible deck.

With the free-form design that using sand and pavers allows, "you can build the deck in any shape you want," Hillam says of his semicircular deck. There are other pluses too. "There's no maintenance or wood rot, no dead animals under the deck."

A raised bed holding Hillam's cycads adjoins the pond area with the deck (right and back). The koi pond is more than 18 inches deep, so the area had to be surrounded by a five-foot-high fence (here, two feet of brick and three feet of wrought iron).

"My disability, a spinal cord injury, confines me to a battery-powered wheelchair," says Hillam. "The pavers made ramp installation easy, and we didn't have to pour concrete."

by Marie Hofer, Gardening editor, HGTV.com

Bruce Hillam and his wife wanted a good place to relax and enjoy the view--their California home is on a ridge that offers a lovely view of a canyon and of a golf course below. The city where they live requires that all decks--wood or otherwise "built"--go through the permitting process, but any raised bed is considered a landscape element, which doesn't require a building permit. Hillam had already built some raised beds on his tough-as-nails soil, plus he needed to create a ramp to accommodate his wheelchair, so the solution was easy: build a raised patio.

"I went to the local Home Depot, bought a bunch of interlocking retaining wall blocks, made a wall about two feet high, got 10 cubic yards of sand to fill up the area, leveled it and put pavers on the top and on the side." The whole process took two men two days to complete. And the result is a deck that affords a view of not only the valley below but also of the koi pond and cycad collection, two of Hillam's hobbies.

"The retaining wall blocks were put up in about two hours, which included making sure everything was level. Wheelbarrowing the sand from the front of the house to the backyard took a day, and putting in the pavers and rimming them to fit took the better part of a day." The only problem? Last year a gopher burrowed under one edge, and 10 pavers along the perimeter sank. Hillam bought a small amount of pea-gravel sand mixture, and hired someone to pull the depressed pavers up, dump the sand mixture down and replace the pavers. The repair took less than a hour.

Six years after it was created, Hillam is still pleased with his deck. "It's permanent, never needs staining, solid (has survived the earthquakes of the past six years)."