Wooden Pergola – Design and Build Your Own

Working with wood is a long time favorite of home improvement enthusiasts and handymen in general, which is why wood pergolas make perfect sense for the DIY minded home owner.  Pergolas are an attractive and functional addition to your deck, patio, or garden.  They can serve as a visual aesthetic, shade provider, or even as a trellis.  In some cases, you can get the benefits of all three at once.

There are of course other materials you can use other than wood.  Prebuilt pergola designs are available in PVC, aluminum, steel, and other materials beside.  These types of pergolas are generally more of a kit build, with little to no actual fabrication involved by the assembler.  While efficient, they may not bring the rustic charm that timber pergolas can, and certainly won’t provide as much enjoyment or fulfillment from building for the do-it-yourself enthusiast.

Examining Pergola Parts

Pergolas are essentially quite simple structures.  Generally consisting of posts set on foundations, beams to tie the posts together and then rafters or runners that provide most of the visual impact and functionality.  While simple when put this way, there are a myriad of options and interactions with environmental variables that can make building a wooden pergola quite an interesting project.  Certainly to get the best pergola for your situation can be quite a challenge.

For instance, the height of the pergola has many implications on the functionality and usefulness of the pergola.  Too low, and it will make the area underneath feel closed in and restrictive.  Too high, and when the sun is lower in the sky there will be less shade cast by the pergola.  (Though shade is not always a concern with pergolas, it can be in many cases.)

Not only does the height affect the feel and functionality, but can also impact the look tremendously.  Shorter posts will by nature look thicker in relation to the same width of posts on a taller pergola.  This gives you the ability to customize the look somewhat.  Short and stocky, or tall and lithe.  There are some structural concerns as well, though often the loads on pergolas aren’t such that it will become a major issue.  Still, it’s good to run your plans by a professional to make sure you aren’t overlooking something that will come back to haunt you later on.  By doing so, you will ensure that you keep your pergola designs free of potentially negative features.

Ask Your Plants How to Build a Pergola Right

Another consideration with the height of the pergola is it’s possible use as a trellis.  Each plant is going to have it’s own preferences about the optimal height of the trellis from the root system, and making sure that you can plant in that optimal range will greatly increase the productivity and health of the plant.  One way you can compensate for this is to have a potted plant hanging from the pergola itself.  This way you can very precisely set the height of the trellis from the roots of the plant.

A second way that you can approach this is to include an arbor or other trellis like structure on the side of the pergola.  This would allow the vines to climb the side to their heart’s content, and even make for a very lovely privacy screen that would help to cool the area under the pergola if positioned correctly.

Other Factors to Consider When Building a Wooden Pergola

How to build a pergola on a deck can be somewhat tricky in some cases.  The nature of the deck can greatly influence how you should support the pergola so that it is as secure and safe as it can be.  An elevated deck already has it’s structural requirements designed in, and if it hasn’t been designed for use with a wooden pergola, it might be dangerous to try to support the pergola from off the deck.  In such a case you may find that you need to increase the strength of the deck supports or even foundations to compensate for the added weight the pergola will place on it.

You could always just bypass the deck completely and build the supports for the pergola from the ground up.  This would be simpler, but also could be an eye sore as you will have more posts.  Designed right though, and you could make those extra posts into a feature all their own of course, so there are a lot of options in this regard.

Of course, if your deck is made of cement and is well founded, there should be no problem adding a wood pergola on it, even a very extensive one.  There are still structural considerations to take into account though.  One of the main ones involved in building a wooden pergola would be to make sure the wood you are using is well suited to the purpose.

Not all types of wood perform well outdoors, and the strength and weight of the wood will vary.  While you can still use types of wood that have low strength to weight ratios, doing so will result in a more massive pergola.  Lighter and stronger types of wood give you more control over the overall look and feel of the pergola, and so unless you simply must have something else, they should be the way to go.

In most any case though, your wood pergola should be treated with a sealer to keep it safe from the effects of weathering.