A pergola is the fastest way to turn a slab into a room — shade overhead, structure around you, a place for the fan and the string lights. Here's what we walk through with every homeowner before a single post is set.
Cedar, steel, or both
Cedar brings warmth and takes stain beautifully; it wants a re-oil or re-stain every few years to keep its color. Powder-coated steel is nearly maintenance-free and spans further with slimmer profiles. Our favorite builds pair them: cedar beams and rafters on steel post bases and brackets — warmth where you see it, strength where it counts.
The footings are the build
Oklahoma straight-line winds treat a pergola like a sail. What keeps it standing isn't the lumber dimension — it's posts anchored to engineered concrete piers with real hardware. Surface-pinning posts to a patio slab that was never poured to carry them is the most common failure we're called to fix.
This is why building the pergola and the concrete together matters: footings, post layout, and slab joints get planned as one system instead of improvised on top of each other.
Orientation and rafter spacing
Shade is geometry: rafter direction and spacing decide how much sun reaches the space at 4 PM in July. We orient the rafters against the hot-afternoon sun path, and set spacing for the balance you want between light and shade — tighter for a dining area, more open over a lounge.