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Almost certainly not, if it was built as an ordinary deck. That’s not a sales pitch. It’s arithmetic, and the numbers come from the City of Naperville’s own published tables. A standard residential deck is designed for 50 pounds per square foot. A filled hot tub with people in it puts down roughly twice that, concentrated in one corner. The gap is the whole problem. The good news is that this is a solvable problem, and it’s usually cheaper to solve than people expect if you catch it before the tub is delivered. It gets expensive when the tub arrives first. What code actually assumes about your deck Naperville’s deck design rules follow the IRC, […]

Two Naperville homeowners called us the same week last spring. Both wanted a 16×25 composite deck off the back of the house. Same size, same board, same railing. One quote came back a little over $28,000. The other was closer to $37,000. Neither of them was being overcharged. The houses were about nine miles apart, and almost everything that made the second deck cost more had nothing to do with the deck itself. People assume a deck is priced by the square foot, like carpet. It isn’t. Roughly a third of what you pay covers things that happen before a single board goes down: getting equipment into the yard, digging footings deep enough for the […]

By Radu Oprea, Owner, Wolf Spirit Deck. Illinois Contractor License #TGC119852. Naperville office: 2020 Calamos Ct, Suite 200. Last updated: August 2026. The call usually goes well for about four minutes. Someone in Ashbury or off 95th Street tells me their deck frame is solid, the boards are just tired and gray, and they want composite laid over the top. I agree that resurfacing is often the right move. We book a visit. Then I get there, pry up one board near the middle, hook my tape on the side of a joist, and pull it to the next one. Twenty four inches. That is the moment the conversation changes, and it is the single […]

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, […]

By Radu Oprea, Owner, Wolf Spirit Deck · Illinois Contractor License #TGC119852 · 2020 Calamos Ct, Suite 200, Naperville, IL 60563 · Published August 2026 Corner lot owners usually think they have more yard to work with. On paper they do. In zoning terms they have less buildable yard than the neighbor in the middle of the block, and most of them find that out when we hand over the first drawing. The reason is simple once you see it. Naperville treats the street-facing side of a corner lot as a corner side yard, not an interior side yard, and the setback on that side is two to four times deeper. I have watched more […]