Excel Custom Deck Builders

Excel Custom Deck Builders is a family-owned deck contractor working across the Milwaukee area, southeast Wisconsin and into northern Illinois. The trade is decks, and the range is wide: custom design and construction, composite decking, pergolas, screen rooms, pool decks and full outdoor living spaces. Two things Excel Custom Deck Builders puts front and center are a Lifetime Labor Warranty and free annual inspections. That pairing is a meaningful promise from any contractor whose work has to survive Wisconsin winters, where freeze-and-thaw cycles are exactly what pry fasteners loose and open gaps in a deck frame over the years.

What the crew builds, and what backs it

Decks are the core, and the descriptions across the listings agree on the scope. Excel Custom Deck Builders handles design as well as construction, so a homeowner is not stitching together a separate designer and a separate crew. Keeping design and build under one roof also means one point of accountability when something needs adjusting, instead of a designer and an installer pointing at each other.

The reach is regional: alongside Milwaukee, the company turns up under locations in Madison, Appleton, Oshkosh and Franksville, which puts a good stretch of eastern and southern Wisconsin inside its service area. Beyond flat platforms it builds pergolas, including pergola-integrated decks where the shade structure is part of the deck rather than bolted on afterward, plus screen rooms for anyone who wants to keep mosquitoes off a July evening.

Composite decking and the brands behind it

Composite decking is where the specifics get useful. Excel Custom Deck Builders works with TimberTech, Fiberon and Trex, three of the better-known composite lines, which says something about the tier the company operates in. These are boards a homeowner picks for low maintenance and a long life, since composite does not need the yearly sanding, staining and sealing that a wood deck demands to stay presentable.

They cost more upfront than pressure-treated pine, and the payoff comes later in weekends not spent on a ladder with a stain can. A contractor that installs all three offers real choice on color, texture and price instead of pushing one house brand, and that choice drives a large part of the final quote.

It is a detail worth confirming early, because the board you land on sets the budget more than almost anything else in the project.

Pergolas, screen rooms and pool decks

Pool decks are their own skill, separate from a raised backyard deck: drainage, slip resistance and the way the surface meets the coping all come into play, and the listings put pool decks squarely in what Excel Custom Deck Builders takes on. Screen rooms and pergolas fill out the rest of the outdoor-living side. Put together, the offering reads like a contractor after the whole backyard, from the framing up to the shade overhead, not a one-off platform.

The Lifetime Labor Warranty and the free annual inspections point the same direction, since both only pay off for a company planning a long relationship with each address it builds at.

A yearly inspection also catches a small problem, a popped board or a loose rail, while it is still cheap to fix.

Checking the record from the outside

This is where the review has to slow down, because Excel Custom Deck Builders runs a site that did not load when checked.

The page returned a forbidden error, and a fallback fetch failed as well, so nothing below comes from the company's own pages. It all comes from outside listings, and those listings tell a slightly tangled story about who exactly is who. For a review, an unreachable site is itself a small data point: it means judging the work through other people's records instead of the company's own shopfront.

One name, several listings

The tangle is worth spelling out, because it changes how much weight any single rating deserves. The Better Business Bureau lists an 'Excel Custom Decks, LLC' in Madison as accredited with an A+ rating. A separate BBB profile under the 'Excel Custom Deck Builders' name shows as not accredited, so the strongest BBB mark does not attach cleanly to the exact name printed on this page.

Phone numbers multiply too. One sits on the Madison BBB profile, another on a Milwaukee Yellow Pages listing, a third turns up in a company blog post, and each is tied to a different address in Madison, Milwaukee or Raymond.

A Houzz profile with a 4.5 out of 5 belongs to 'Excel Custom Contractors, LLC' in Franklin, a similarly named but distinct business whose connection to Excel Custom Deck Builders is unconfirmed, which means that score should not be pinned to this company at all.

None of this necessarily signals anything shady. A regional contractor with separate location pages for Madison, Milwaukee and the Fox Valley naturally spawns separate directory entries, each with its own phone line, and the records drift apart over years in business. It does mean the burden is on the buyer to match the accreditation, the warranty and the crew that shows up to one and the same legal name.

What the company claims, and what the listings show

On its own materials the company points to a five-star Yelp review and multiple awards for craftsmanship. Both are self-reported and could not be verified here, and a single five-star review does not carry a whole reputation by itself, even when it is genuine. Awards for craftsmanship, with no issuing body named, are the softest kind of claim a contractor can make; they mean something only once you can see who handed them out.

Yelp does carry at least two listings for Excel Custom Deck Builders, a Madison page with 51 photos and a Milwaukee-area page with 29, which at least shows real projects documented in real places. The photo counts are the solid part; the star ratings did not surface in what turned up. For a homeowner weighing Excel Custom Deck Builders, the fair read is that the visual portfolio looks real while the headline ratings rest partly on the company's own word.

Who should call, and what to confirm

So where does this leave a homeowner? Excel Custom Deck Builders comes across as a legitimate, established outdoor-living contractor with a real portfolio, a serious warranty and a materials list covering the major composite brands. The catch is administrative, not structural. The name shows up across several BBB and phone records, and the strongest third-party marks either sit under a slightly different entity or cannot be confirmed independently. A homeowner spending five figures on a deck has every reason to sort out which entity is which before money changes hands. That is a due-diligence problem, and a solvable one.

The warranty is the piece most worth nailing down. A Lifetime Labor Warranty is only as good as the company standing behind it and the paperwork that names that company, so a promise attached to one legal entity does a homeowner little good if a different one signs the contract. Get the two to match.

A Milwaukee-area homeowner planning a composite deck or a pool deck is the natural fit for Excel Custom Deck Builders, and the smart opening move is a phone call rather than a signature. On that call, confirm which legal entity will actually sign the job, ask that the Lifetime Labor Warranty and the free annual inspections be written into the contract, and pin down which BBB profile and which phone number belong to the crew doing business in Milwaukee.

Ask to handle the TimberTech, Fiberon and Trex samples in person, and get the winning quote in writing before anyone lifts a framing nailer. It is fair, too, to ask for two or three recent Milwaukee references and to confirm the crew pulls the required permits, both ordinary requests a solid contractor answers without hesitation. Do that, and the paperwork tangle around Excel Custom Deck Builders turns from a worry into a checklist.

---