A thousand people on US 85
Gilcrest is a small farm town on US 85 between Platteville and La Salle, about 4,750 feet up on flat agricultural ground — 1,029 residents at the 2020 census. The housing is a compact grid of modest early-to-mid-1900s homes in Old Town and around Ash Street and Municipal Park, with a few newer infill lots. Yards are small, houses are older, and there is nothing between a south-facing back door and the sky.
Permits at Town Hall, or with the county
Inside town limits, the Town of Gilcrest handles building permits directly at Town Hall, 304 8th Street. There is no online portal; the Building Permit Application is a printable form on the town's Forms page, with a fee handout alongside it, and the office keeps Tuesday–Friday 10–6 and Saturday 10–2 hours. The town's building guides reference the 2018 IRC. The town does not state online who performs inspections, so we confirm that with Town Hall at application time. Parcels outside the town line are unincorporated Weld County and file with the county Building Department in Greeley.
Plains engineering
Gilcrest publishes no design criteria of its own, so the regional Weld County values apply: 30 psf ground snow, 115 mph three-second-gust wind, and a 30-inch frost depth. Snow is the easy number here. Wind is the one that sizes a pergola or patio cover — uplift on the roof, connectors at every post, bases that resist pull-out. Footings go below frost, drilled into farm clay that heaves a shallow pad every spring.
Hail and sun decide the surface. Weld County is hail country, and a south-facing deck at this elevation takes UV that fails a wood finish in two seasons. Capped composite takes both and asks for a hose instead of a stain.
What we build in Gilcrest
On the grid, the design work is fitting a genuinely useful deck inside a small setback and matching it to the scale of an older home. The typical project is a modest composite deck with a partial cover on the sunny side and new railing — the original wood verticals are usually the first thing to fail and the first thing an inspector notices. Slim aluminum railing suits these houses and keeps a small deck from feeling boxed in. We are a Trex, TimberTech, and Deckorators dealer.
Repair or replace
Many Gilcrest decks were built decades ago to a lighter standard. We inspect the ledger, posts, footings, and hardware before quoting, and photograph what we find. Sound framing gets a re-deck at $20–$35 per square foot — new surface, new railing, same bones. A failed ledger, posts rotted at grade, or footings above frost get a replacement plan built to current code. We quote the repair against the cost of replacement so you can compare the two directly.
Sixty minutes up US 85
Gilcrest is about sixty minutes from our Centennial shop, straight up US 85 between our Platteville and La Salle work. We block these US 85 towns together so a crew is on site for consecutive days rather than commuting for half-days.
Run the cost calculator for a planning range, then tell us what you are planning.