The Texas Backyard Build Calendar: Pergolas, Patios, Kitchens and Pools, and How Long a Build Takes
Updated Published 7 min read
Every Memorial Day, backyards get a hard look: pergolas, outdoor kitchens, pavilions, screened porches, decks, fire features, pools. Here’s what each one involves in Fort Worth, what drives the cost, how long a build takes, and what’s realistic if you start today.
Late May is when the backyard starts to look like a project.
Pergola people. Outdoor kitchen people. “We saw this pavilion on Instagram and we want it” people. Pool deck people. Screened-in porch people. People who hosted Memorial Day weekend, looked at their plain concrete slab and pressure-treated railing from 2009, and decided life was too short.
This is our Texas Backyard Build Calendar for 2026, project by project.
Some of this is going to be encouraging. Some of it is going to be a reality check.
First, the Conversation About Timing
If you’re reading this in late May or early June and want a major backyard build done in time to use it this summer, the calendar is tight.
Start with the permit. Whether your project needs one, and which ones, is something to find out before it’s drawn, not after it’s built. A pool is permitted separately from any structure around it, and gas or electrical for an outdoor kitchen adds its own sub-permits. Permits for our outdoor projects run $1,200 to $4,000 in Fort Worth.
Then the build. Our pool and outdoor projects take three to seven months, depending on what gets built. Start the design now and a covered patio or an outdoor kitchen can be ready for fall, and in Texas, fall is when a backyard earns its keep.
Reading this later in the year? The same three-to-seven-month clock applies: start now and you’re building for spring.
So let’s talk about what to build and how to choose.
The Pergola: Shade Without a Roof
The pergola became the default Texas backyard upgrade. A well-designed one turns a flat patio into a defined outdoor room.
Size and material drive what a pergola costs. A small cedar pergola shades a couple of chairs. One big enough to cover a dining table and seating is a place to eat dinner.
Aluminum pergolas, especially the louvered ones that open and close, are still the trend. Motors and rain sensors push the price up. They’re not for everyone, but they close when the afternoon rain comes.
A pergola’s open rafters break up the sun and let the air move, but rain falls straight through them. If you want to sit outside through a storm, you want a roof. Here’s how we design covered patios and pergolas.
Lighting is what gets a pergola used at night: string lights tied to a switch, recessed downlights in the beams, uplighting at the posts. A pergola without lighting gets used until dusk. A pergola with thoughtful lighting gets used until midnight.
The Outdoor Kitchen: Where Budgets Get Real
This is where the conversation shifts.
A basic outdoor kitchen is a built-in grill, a counter and a side burner. Add a sink and you need a plumbing line. Add a refrigerator and you need power. Our outdoor work runs $35,000 to $400,000, and an outdoor kitchen sits toward the low end of that range. That’s a range, not a quote: construction plus our fee, before permits and contingency.
Premium builds add pizza ovens, beverage fridges, more than one grill, ventilation, ice makers and a full roof. Each one raises the number.
Ask this first: how often will you actually cook out here? Twice a month or twice a week, the answer tells you how much kitchen makes sense.
Don’t put the money in the grill. If you want to feel good about your outdoor kitchen for years, spend it on the cabinetry, the counter and the cover. Those last, and they’re what make the space feel finished. More on how we design outdoor kitchens.
The Covered Pavilion: An Outdoor Living Room
The next step up from a pergola is a covered pavilion: an outdoor structure with a solid roof. Asphalt shingles or standing seam metal on top, framed by posts, often with a flat or vaulted ceiling underneath.
A pavilion’s price moves with its size, its finish and whether it’s attached. Tying the roof into your house’s roofline takes more engineering than a freestanding one, and it makes the pavilion look like it came with the house.
Where pavilions get expensive fast is the comfort: ceiling fans (essential in Texas), recessed lighting, an insulated ceiling (worth it if you’ll run any AC nearby), outdoor-rated speakers and a TV. In this climate, a loaded pavilion gets used much of the year.
The look for 2026 runs darker: black, charcoal or very dark walnut stains on the wood, exposed metal hardware, matte black ceiling fans and cable lighting in the beams. Natural cedar with warm string lights is giving way to something moodier and more architectural.
A pergola with thoughtful lighting gets used until midnight.
The Screened Porch: Built for Mosquito Season
Mosquitoes are the part of a DFW summer nobody plans for. From June through September, an open patio is a beautiful idea you stop using by 8 p.m. A screened porch is the same patio used until 11.
If you already have a covered patio, screening it in is the smallest version of this, and it stretches the season of a space you already have.
Building a new screened porch means structure, roof and screens together. Retractable motorized screens let you have a screened porch in summer and an open patio in spring and fall.
Screened porches are coming back because more people work from home, and a screened porch becomes a usable third room: a workspace in the morning, a place to eat lunch, a place to have coffee with a friend without setting up the dining room.
The Deck: Composite Is the Question
If you’re building or rebuilding a deck in 2026, the central question is composite versus pressure-treated.
Pressure-treated pine costs less up front. It needs staining or sealing every few years to last.
Composite (Trex, TimberTech and the rest) costs more up front and needs almost no upkeep: wash it with a hose a couple of times a year.
If you’ll own the home a long time, composite often wins over its life, because you skip the upkeep and the replacement. If you’re selling in a few years, pressure-treated is the cheaper way to a good deck.
The 2026 look on decks is dark composite (charcoal, ebony, very dark walnut) with horizontal cable railings or matte black metal rails. The warm cedar deck with white railings looks like 2010. If you want your deck to look current, go dark and go horizontal on the railings.
A deck on its own is a job for a deck builder.
The Fire Pit or Outdoor Fireplace
A fire feature changes how a backyard feels after dark. It can be a simple fire pit, a gas-fed one with a line run from the house, or a full outdoor fireplace with a chimney, masonry and a hearth. A fire pit on its own belongs to a trade that builds fire pits every day and will price one better than we would. A fireplace built into a covered patio or an outdoor kitchen is the kind we design as part of the whole backyard.
Fire features and a covered room let you keep using the backyard into the cooler months.
The Pool: Setting Expectations
The question comes up every spring: can we have a pool by summer?
If you’re asking in late May, plan on swimming next summer. A pool falls inside the same three-to-seven-month build as the rest of the backyard.
What you can do now: start the design and the permit, so the pool is in the ground for next season.
A pool by itself runs about $75,000 to $300,000, before anything is built around it. Our custom pools are built by independent contractors we partner with, and everything around the water is ours, designed with the pool rather than after it. Grade and drainage can rule out a plan, so they get settled before anything is dug. More on custom pools.
What to Do Right Now
If you called us today and said “we want to make our backyard better this year,” here’s the conversation we’d have.
Decide how you’ll use it. A backyard for cooking for twelve and one for reading alone in the morning are different designs, and how you’ll use it moves the number more than square footage does.
On budget, a covered patio or an outdoor kitchen sits at the low end of what we build, and a pool with a full outdoor kitchen and living space sits at the top.
If the plan is smaller than that (some lighting, a fire pit, a deck, new beds), it’s a good upgrade, and a specialist is the better call for it.
If it has a structure in it (a covered living space, an outdoor kitchen, a pool, or all of it as one plan), that’s work we design and build as one backyard in Fort Worth, with the pool itself built by a contractor we partner with.
The only wrong answer is over-building for the way you actually live. A full outdoor kitchen you cook in four times a year is a worse backyard than a good cover over a grill you use every week.
Book a free walk-through: a designer and a builder walk the backyard with you and give you an honest estimate, with no obligation. Build season is on. Let’s make something good.
