By Radu Oprea, Owner, Wolf Spirit Deck · Illinois Contractor License #TGC119852 · 2020 Calamos Ct, Suite 200, Naperville, IL 60563 · Last updated: August 2026
A homeowner in White Eagle called me last spring, upset. She had three quotes for a 16 by 20 deck off the back of her house. Two came in around $24,000. One came in at $31,000. She wanted to know why the third guy was trying to rob her.
He wasn’t. He was the only one who had walked to the back of the house and noticed the full-height brick.
Her deck could not legally bolt to that wall. It needed its own beam line and four more footings, which is roughly $6,000 of concrete, steel, lumber, and labor that the other two bids quietly left out. Those two contractors were either going to bolt into brick anyway, which is a code violation and a genuine safety problem, or come back after the permit review with a change order.
So here is the post I wish more people in this town read before they collected bids. What is on the back of your house changes how the deck gets built, what it costs, and in a few cases whether it can touch the house at all.
Why the wall matters in the first place
Most decks hang off a board called a ledger. It is a pressure treated 2×8 or larger, bolted flat to the house, and the deck joists sit in hangers off it. That single board carries something close to half the weight of your entire deck plus everyone standing on it.
The ledger is not bolted to your siding. It is bolted through the siding into the rim joist, which is the band of framing lumber that runs around the perimeter of your floor system. Siding is just a raincoat. It holds up nothing.
Two things follow from that. First, the siding has to come off where the ledger goes. The American Wood Council’s Prescriptive Residential Wood Deck Construction Guide, which Naperville plan reviewers work from alongside the IRC, is blunt about it: the exterior finish must be removed before the ledger goes on, and corrosion resistant flashing is required at the connection. Anyone who tells you they can screw a ledger over your siding is telling you they plan to rot your rim joist.
Second, and this is the part that costs money, some claddings sit in front of a wall you are not allowed to bolt to at all.
Brick and stone veneer: the expensive answer
If the back of your house is full brick or stone, or has a masonry chimney chase where the deck wants to land, your deck almost certainly becomes freestanding.
The guide prohibits ledger attachment to exterior veneers outright. The reason is structural, not bureaucratic. Brick veneer on a wood framed house is one wythe thick, it hangs off the frame with corrugated metal ties every few feet, and there is a one inch air gap behind it. It carries its own weight and nothing else. Bolt a deck to it and you are asking a decorative skin and a handful of sheet metal ties to hold up eight people and a grill.
Long anchors through the brick into the rim joist do not solve it either. You end up with a half inch bolt spanning an inch of open air, which bends, and you have punched a hole through the drainage plane that will eventually drip onto the sill plate.
What we do instead is add a second beam near the house on its own posts and footings, so the deck stands on four points instead of three sides. The house still gets used for lateral bracing, which is required, but it carries no vertical load. It works fine. It is just more deck.
Around Naperville that shows up most on the older brick homes off Ogden and on the two story colonials in the newer subdivisions where the builder ran brick or stone across the full rear elevation instead of just the front.
Stucco and EIFS: proceed carefully
Real three coat stucco over lath is manageable. We cut it back to solid framing, attach and flash the ledger, then patch and seal the cut. It is fussy work and adds a day, but the assembly behind it is normal wood frame.
EIFS is a different animal. Synthetic stucco is foam board over adhesive over a weather barrier, and depending on the vintage it may drain or it may not. Cutting into it opens a wall that punishes mistakes for years without showing you anything from the outside. When I find EIFS, I usually recommend going freestanding even though the framing behind it would technically accept a ledger. Not because the code stops us, but because I do not want to be the guy who put the first hole in a wall that had been fine for twenty years.
You will find EIFS scattered through the mid nineties builds and on a handful of the custom homes along the 95th Street corridor.
Vinyl siding: the easy one
Vinyl is the friendliest thing you can have back there, and a good chunk of Naperville has it.
We snap the courses off with a zip tool, cut the sheathing back cleanly, bolt the ledger to the rim joist with half inch lag screws or through bolts on the spacing the joist span calls for, run continuous flashing with a drip edge over the top, and rework the J channel around it. Vinyl comes off in one piece and goes back on in one piece. There is no patching and no color matching problem, because we are only cutting a strip the height of the ledger.
If your siding is vinyl and your framing behind it is normal, nothing about the wall should add cost to your quote. If a contractor is charging you extra for wall prep on a vinyl house, ask what for.
LP SmartSide, fiber cement, and cedar
These three behave similarly. All of them are nailed lap siding over sheathing, all of them need to be cut rather than unzipped, and none of them go back on the way they came off.
Engineered wood siding like LP SmartSide is common in the late nineties and 2000s subdivisions here. It cuts cleanly but the exposed edge has to be sealed or it wicks water. Fiber cement is heavier, dulls blades, and cracks if you are careless near the nail line. Cedar is the most forgiving to cut and the least forgiving to leave unfinished.
The practical difference from vinyl is a few hours of labor and some trim work where the deck meets the wall. Call it a couple hundred dollars, not a couple thousand. Worth knowing about, not worth losing sleep over.
What is behind the siding matters too
This is the part almost nobody asks about, and it is where I have had to redraw more plans than anything on the cladding side.
Homes built here before the mid nineties usually have solid sawn 2x lumber rim joists. That is the condition every span table assumes and it is the easiest to work with.
Homes built after that often use engineered floor systems. If yours has wood I-joists with a laminated veneer lumber rim board, and that rim is an inch or thicker, we can attach to it, though the fastener spacing tightens up compared to solid lumber. If the rim is thinner than an inch, no ledger.
The one that catches people out is metal plate connected floor trusses. Builders finish those with a 2×4 ribbon board at the ends, and a 2×4 ribbon is there to keep the trusses from tipping over during construction. It is not there to hold up your deck. Attaching to it requires a detail from the original truss designer, which nobody has, so in practice it means a freestanding deck.
Same answer for cantilevered bump outs. If your family room or breakfast nook sticks out past the foundation on cantilevered joists, and half the colonials in this town do, the deck cannot hang off it. That framing was sized to carry a floor and a wall, not a deck full of people.
Roughly what we find, by era
None of this is a substitute for someone standing in your yard, and builders mixed materials constantly. But this is the pattern across the jobs we quote in 60540, 60563, 60564, and 60565.
| Home vintage and area | Usually on the rear wall | Typical outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-1970 near downtown and off Ogden | Brick, cedar, aluminum | Often freestanding, solid lumber rim |
| 1980s, Cress Creek and Saybrook | Hardboard, vinyl, brick fronts only | Ledger, solid lumber rim |
| 1990s, Ashbury and similar | Vinyl, some EIFS, cantilevered bump outs | Ledger, watch the bump out |
| Late 1990s to 2000s, Tall Grass and White Eagle | LP or fiber cement, full rear brick on some elevations | Split. Check for floor trusses |
| 2000s onward, 95th Street corridor | Fiber cement, stone veneer, stucco | Freestanding more often than not |
Swipe the table sideways on a small screen.
What the difference costs
Going freestanding on a mid size Naperville deck adds somewhere in the range of $3,000 to $7,000. The spread is wide because it depends on how far the deck sits off the ground and how deep the footings have to go.
You are paying for a second beam, three to five more footings, the posts, the hardware, and the extra day of digging and pouring. On lots where the grade falls away, which happens in the neighborhoods sloping toward the DuPage River, it can also mean helical piles instead of poured concrete, and the soil conditions across town vary more than most people expect.
Against our usual range of $60 to $95 per square foot installed, a freestanding 320 square foot deck lands closer to the top of that band than the bottom. That is not padding. It is a different structure.
The flip side is that freestanding decks are better decks in a few ways. Nothing is bolted to your house, so there is no ledger to flash and no ledger to fail. Ledger failures are how old decks quietly rot the wall behind them, and a freestanding deck simply removes that failure mode. I have never been sorry to build one.
How to figure out what you have before you call anybody
Walk out back and look at the wall the deck would attach to. Not the front of the house. Builders around here put the nice materials where the neighbors can see them and something cheaper on the back, so the two elevations are often different.
Then check three things. Is the material brick or stone all the way up, or does it stop at a water table with siding above? Does any part of the rear wall stick out past the foundation below it? And if you have an unfinished basement, go down and look up at where the floor framing meets the outside wall, because you will be able to see whether you have solid lumber, I-joists, or trusses.
Take a photo of each. If you send those three photos with your quote request, whoever comes out will have already done half the thinking before they arrive.
What we do about it
We figure out the attachment before anything gets drawn, not after. On brick and stone we price the freestanding structure into the original quote instead of discovering it at permit review, which is where the City of Naperville will catch it if we do not. Their reviewers ask for the framing plan with the ledger detail called out, and an attachment that is not permitted comes back marked.
On engineered floor systems we go look at the rim before we commit to a ledger. On EIFS we have the conversation about whether opening that wall is worth it to you.
We build in composite exclusively, on wood or steel framing depending on the lot, and we pull every permit and stand for the footing, framing, and final inspections. The attachment detail is the part of your deck you will never see once the boards go down, which is exactly why it is the part worth getting right.
Questions we get about this
Can a deck attach to brick if the brick is structural rather than veneer? In theory a solid masonry wall, meaning brick all the way through or a poured concrete foundation, will take a ledger with approved expansion or adhesive anchors. In practice, almost no residential house in Naperville is built that way above the foundation line. What looks like a brick house is a wood framed house wearing brick. We verify rather than assume.
Will I lose my siding warranty if you cut into it? Cutting for a deck ledger is a normal alteration and is not what voids a siding warranty. Poor flashing afterward can void it, and it is a fair thing to ask any contractor to explain before they start. We flash with continuous corrosion resistant metal and a drip edge, and we do not use aluminum flashing against treated lumber because the copper in the treatment eats it.
Is a freestanding deck less sturdy? No. It is often stiffer, because it stands on posts and footings rather than cantilevering off the house. It still gets anchored to the house for lateral bracing. What it does not do is put vertical load on your wall.
Does the siding type change my permit? It changes the drawings, not the fee. Naperville wants to see how the deck connects to the house, so a freestanding design gets an additional beam and footing line on the plan. Review time is the same two to four weeks either way.
My neighbor bolted a deck to brick and it has been fine for ten years. Plenty of them are still standing. Deck failures are usually slow, and the ones that collapse tend to go at the ledger with no warning. It is also going to show up when the house sells, because inspectors look at deck attachments now. I would rather build you the structure that passes.
Get an actual answer for your wall
We are at 2020 Calamos Ct, Suite 200, off Diehl Road near the Route 59 corridor, and most of our work sits within twenty minutes of that door. If you want to know what your siding and framing mean for your project, call (312) 765-3998 or request a free on-site quote. We will walk the back of the house, look at the rim if we can get to it, and tell you which kind of deck you are actually buying before you compare it against anyone else’s number.
More on what we build in Naperville, our composite decking options, and how the process works.
We also build in Lisle, Aurora, Downers Grove, and Hinsdale, where the housing stock differs enough that the answers change.
Wolf Spirit Deck 2020 Calamos Ct, Suite 200, Naperville, IL 60563 (312) 765-3998 · Illinois Contractor License #TGC119852 Serving 60540, 60563, 60564, and 60565
