It's the first question at almost every walkthrough: composite or wood? Both are good decks when they're built right - but they behave very differently over ten years, and the right answer depends on how you want to spend your weekends and your budget.
The honest cost picture
In the Metro East, a pressure-treated wood deck typically runs $8,500 to $15,000, while the same footprint in composite lands between $17,000 and $30,000. That gap is real - but it's only half the math.
Wood needs cleaning and re-staining every two to three years. Do it yourself and that's a weekend plus $150 in materials each round; hire it out and it's $500-$900 per cycle. Over 15 years, a maintained wood deck quietly closes most of the price gap - and an unmaintained one starts splintering, cupping, and graying by year five.
Composite costs more on day one. Wood costs more every year after. The question is which bill you'd rather pay.
How they age in Illinois weather
Our freeze-thaw cycles are hard on decking. Wood absorbs moisture, swells, and contracts - that's what opens cracks and pops fasteners. Composite boards are far more dimensionally stable, and modern capped composites shrug off the humidity that makes older decks slick with mildew on shaded north-facing yards.
Where wood still wins
- Upfront budget: when the priority is the most deck for the money right now.
- Custom shapes and stairs: complex framing details are cheaper to execute in lumber.
- The look: some homeowners simply want real grain underfoot - and a maintained cedar-tone deck is hard to beat.
What we recommend most often
If you plan to stay in the house more than five years and don't love maintenance, composite usually earns its price. If you're staging a house to sell, or building a large entertaining deck where the budget has to stretch, wood built on a properly footed frame - the frame matters more than the boards - is still a great deck.
Either way, the substructure is identical at Threshold: 30-inch footings below the Madison County frost line, engineered ledger connections, and hardware rated for the load. The boards are the finish; the frame is the deck.
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