I have been working on building a deck on my house for five years now (it's a big deck), and I'm finally to the point where I can finish up the decking this year and maybe move on to railings. We want to install one of the 1/8" stainless cable railings. My priorities are: 1. Cheap. 2. Meets code. 3. Cheap. There seem to be several systems out there, but it seems like everyone prices theirs differently, and anchors them differently too. Anyone have any experience with one brand or another they care to comment on? Feeney seems about the easiest to find (even at Lowe's if I recall), there's also Atlantis, and even eBay and Amazon kits. I have every tool under the sun and don't really concern myself with the whole "ease of installation" thing (if you saw how I built my deck, you'd understand) so I'd rather buy a big spool of cable instead of those silly pre-cut lengths that I have to cut to fit anyway. Any thoughts? Thanks, Darel

This is the house. Mostly concerned with the look of the railing. (Safety of course is first lol) so I think horizontal cables could be out. We are in Canada too - so from the back deck the view on the fireplace side isn’t as much of a concern as there is a fence (end lot then across road is school yard) but the backyard we plan to put a lot of effort into so don’t want anything too obstructive. Glass is lovely but then there’s the cleaning. It’s drawn here with spindles but if anyone has an opinion I’m all ears! Thanks

We looked into both of these for our deck a few years ago. Cable railing can be DIY but difficult due to the tension needed to tighten the cables. Also, there may be issues if you have small children using the cables as a ladder. Glass is AMAZINGLY expensive and we had quite a bit of railing area. It also must be all tempered of course. I'm glad fnmroberts posted their photo and that their glass "almost self cleans". Our deck had lots of birds and pine trees around, along with rainy sprinkles followed by dusty winds ugh. We ended up doing painted galvanized livestock fencing. All DIY. DH used various sizes of aluminum C- and U-channel to provide attachment frames to the posts. FYI, these are 4" squares so I'm not sure that they would pass the code test of small-child-head-sized rubber ball. HTH

First find out if either is to code where you live. I actually much prefer a glass and metal rail system to cable but that is just me.