Built by people who live where they build

Why we started

In 2014 the founder of Canmore Deck Builders bought a 12-year-old cedar deck along with the rest of a house in Cougar Creek. By the second spring the piers had heaved, the ledger was pulling away from the rim joist, and one corner of the deck had dropped 1½". The deck had been built by a reputable Calgary contractor, exactly to the code in force when it was built - but not for the conditions of the Bow Valley.

That deck got rebuilt the following summer. The contractor who rebuilt it is the same person who founded Canmore Deck Builders a year later, on the principle that a deck in the Rockies needs to be sized for the snow that actually falls here and the frost that actually pushes here - not for the average across an arbitrary geographic region.

What we believe

A few things that show up in every deck we build:

• Helical piles to below frost. Canmore frost line is 1.2 m. We don't pour concrete pads. Ever.
• 12" joist spacing on every build. The code minimum is 16" for 2x8 SPF; we tighten it to 12" so the deck handles the 1-in-50 winter without measurable deflection.
• Stainless or hot-dip galvanized only. Electroplated fasteners corrode through in 5–7 freeze-thaw cycles. We don't use them anywhere structural.
• Material honesty. If cedar is a bad choice for your specific exposure, we'll say so. We've talked many people out of it and into either larch or composite when the maintenance reality didn't match what they'd planned for.
• Permits, every time. A deck without a permit is a deck that fails on resale. We pull every permit, every time, even when the homeowner says it's fine to skip.

The crew

We're seven people year-round: two lead carpenters, three framers, an apprentice, and a project coordinator who handles permits and material orders. We don't subcontract out the framing - every nail in your deck is driven by someone whose name we know. In the busy season (May through October) we'll bring on one or two seasonal hires, always returning from prior years.

We cap our build pipeline at about 35–45 projects per year. We could grow faster - there's enough demand in the Bow Valley to keep three crews busy - but the moment we lose the ability to have a lead carpenter on site every day of every build, we lose the thing that lets us back our work with a lifetime workmanship guarantee.

What "lifetime workmanship guarantee" actually means

This is one of the most abused phrases in the trades, so we want to be specific. If at any point during the life of your deck a connection we made fails - a ledger tie, a joist hanger, a post-to-beam connection, a stair stringer attachment - we'll come fix it at no cost. Forever. The guarantee transfers to subsequent owners. The only thing it doesn't cover is material failure (covered by manufacturer warranties we pass through) and damage from things outside our control - a falling tree, a structural movement of the house itself, ice dam damage from a roof we didn't install.

We can offer this because of the second number we publish: zero structural callbacks since 2015. That's not because we've been lucky. It's because we over-build everything by a margin the math says we don't need, and we'd rather pay for that margin upfront than pay for a callback later.

Service area

Canmore is home. We also build in Banff, Exshaw, Dead Man's Flats, Lac des Arcs, and through Kananaskis. On occasional referral we'll go to Cochrane or Springbank if the project's a fit. We don't charge for the site visit anywhere in the Bow Valley - show us your space, tell us what you want, and we'll walk you through what's actually possible.