Picture 1 above is how we did ours

Salts painted black

Slats, not salts

Vertical or horizontal pickets. Nice deck!

Question: do you have dogs? If so, I'd enclose a bay for them to get in, their own super-fun shady cave-like lair. But only if you DO have dogs to chase away groundhogs or other varmints that would set up house under there.

We have often used horizontal siding with a gap of 1/2" between individual boards. This will allow for ventilation while still screening the view to the underside area of the porch.

Thanks! Are you talking about white pvc?

IMO a perfect place to have a true 2 level deck out further and then the skirting would be much less and no long set of steps either . I guess now probably siding since I really dislike lattice and the same siding as you already have on the house.

Kind of depends on what the black railing is going to look like when it comes in. What kind of railing did you order?

If you search photos on this site for "deck skirt" you'll see lots of options.

We just did our deck too, literally finishing any day now. We used toasted sand too. Our deck height is very similar to yours. We skirted with vertical skirting. Our rails are black matte aluminum rails (glass insert). We used a border in Coastal Bluff around the skirting (or maybe is fascia?). I think I probably should have just kept it all toasted sand because there wasn't much a colour difference between the two to make it pop. We added a door, so we can access the inside of the deck for stoarge. What kind of landscaping are you doing infront of the skirt? Its a lot of brown to look at so I want to cover it with shrubs or something.

Lovely deck. I would do horizontal slats like @houssaon shows in the 2nd photo. Either do it in matching Trex or you could go white like your siding and trim. I think @houssaon's photo example is especially successful because it's very nicely trimmed out with stout vertical trim pieces in addition to the slats. Very lovely examples.