A Full Rebuild Around One Very Big Door
The old deck was rotting and ready to fall. The homeowners wanted it gone and a true outdoor living space in its place, with one specific demand: a 12-foot sliding door cut into a 14-foot wall, opening the living room directly onto the new deck.
That’s a hard ask. Western Sky Designs took the job.
The 12-Foot Marvin Door
Marvin’s multi-slide tops out at 12 feet tall, and dropping a 12-foot opening into a 14-foot wall leaves almost no header room overhead and barely any jack-stud width on either side.
Solving that meant:
- Engineered structural header sized to carry the load above
- Reframing to redirect weight onto new bearing points
When open, the door erases the wall. When closed, narrow stile-on-stile sightlines keep the view to the deck almost frame-free.
Deckorators Voyage in Costa
The deck floor is Deckorators Voyage in Costa, a warm taupe with golden, driftwood undertones, finished with a darker picture-frame border and step nosings for definition.
Voyage’s Surestone mineral composite handles Colorado freeze-thaw cycling without warping, absorbs virtually no moisture, and offers 34% greater traction than capped composites in wet weather. Backed by a 50-year structural warranty.
Custom-Fabricated Railing with Slim Horizontal Infill
Western Sky Designs designed and welded the railing on-site rather than ordering panels from a catalog.
Black powder-coated steel posts and top rail frame the perimeter, with thin horizontal infill running between them. Sightlines almost disappear from inside the house, so the door opens onto a view rather than a railing.
A Covered Porch Section in Heavy Timber
Part of the deck sits under a stained gable roof with exposed timber posts and a tongue-and-groove plank ceiling. Recessed lighting runs through the planks. The roof shelters the door opening and bridges the indoors to the open-air section beyond.
A Dry Patio Underneath
A Trex RainEscape system runs above the joists, channeling rainwater into gutters and away from the structure below.
The result is a finished, dry patio at grade with a clean wood-plank ceiling overhead, paver flooring underfoot, and real use of what would otherwise be wasted space beneath an elevated deck: two outdoor levels, one footprint.
Built to Solve the Original Problem
Tear down the rot. Build something that lasts. Put a 12-foot door where almost nobody would have tried to put one.
A new elevated deck. A finished patio below. Custom railing that gets out of the way. And a door that turns the back wall of the house into a panoramic opening to the yard.
