Composite vs. wood: a 25-year cost honesty exercise.
The lumber counter shows you one number: price per board. A deck's real cost unfolds over decades — in refinishing cycles, weekends, and replacement boards. This brief runs the lifetime math both ways, including the scenarios where wood wins. Because it sometimes does.
Day-one price is the smallest number in the story
On our builds, pressure-treated pine starts around $30 per square foot installed; mid-grade composite around $39; premium composite and PVC in the high forties. On a 16×20 deck, that's roughly a $2,900 gap between pine and mid-grade composite. That gap is real money, and it's the number most deck decisions get made on.
But the two materials sign you up for very different next 25 years. Wood is a living material in an outdoor environment: it moves, checks, grays, and drinks water. Keeping a pine deck sound and decent-looking means washing and re-sealing or re-staining on roughly a two-to-three-year cycle — more often on the sun-blasted south face, less in shade. Skip the cycle and the surface doesn't just look tired; it cups, splinters, and starts rejecting its fasteners.
The refinishing treadmill, priced
Run a pine deck 25 years and you're looking at somewhere between eight and twelve refinishing cycles. Do it yourself and each cycle costs a few hundred dollars in cleaner, stain, and supplies — plus a full weekend, times two if the weather turns. Hire it out and prep-plus-stain on a 320-square-foot deck with railings commonly runs four figures per cycle. Priced either way, the treadmill quietly adds thousands over the deck's life, and that's before replacing the individual boards that cup or split — a normal, expected line item on any wood deck past year ten.
Composite's maintenance schedule is a hose, mild soap, and a spring afternoon. No sanding, no stain, no sealer, ever — and the major manufacturers back the surface with 25-to-50-year fade and stain warranties. The frame underneath is pressure-treated lumber either way, so frame care (flashing, drainage, joist protection — see TB-103) is identical across every option.
Where composite deserves its criticism
An honesty exercise cuts both ways. Composite runs hotter underfoot in full sun — dark colors especially, worth considering on a south-facing deck where kids go barefoot. It can't be sanded or refinished: a deep gouge is managed or the board is replaced, not buffed out. Early-2000s first-generation composites earned a bad reputation for staining and mold that modern capped boards have largely solved — but "largely" is doing work in that sentence, and cheap uncapped composite still exists; we don't install it. And some people simply want real wood underfoot. That's not irrational; it's a preference with a maintenance bill attached.
When wood is the right call
We'll spec pine without hesitation when the budget is firm and the alternative is no deck or a smaller one — a well-built pine deck beats a composite deck you didn't build. When the house is being sold within a few years, the refinishing treadmill becomes the next owner's story. And when a homeowner tells us they actually like the ritual — the Saturday, the stain, the smell — we believe them. Tropical hardwoods like ipe sit in a third lane: wood's feel with decades of natural durability, at premium-composite money and with its own oiling cadence if you want to keep the color.
What we won't do is let the day-one number make a 25-year decision unexamined. Your proposal prices your deck in the materials you're considering, side by side, so the comparison happens on paper — where it's free.
How Post & Beam specs materials
Decking manufacturers' warranty documents and installation guides (read the exclusions — they're informative) · Forest Products Laboratory publications on exterior wood finishing cycles · Your own calendar: the most honest input in the model.