Design your dock, then check it against the rules

No, and it is important to be clear about that. This tool checks your design against the headline residential limits in Lake George Park Commission regulation 646-1 — surface area, pier width, overall width and setbacks — and, if you add one, the Adirondack Park Agency envelope for a boat house. It cannot see your bottom composition, your mean high and low water marks, your town's zoning overlay, or whether an existing structure carries pre-existing non-conforming status. Treat a green result as 'worth a conversation', not as an approval.

No. The whole designer runs in your browser — the geometry, the materials, the lighting and the compliance report are all computed on your own device, and no design is sent anywhere. The single exception is the optional photoreal render button at the end, which is off by default, requires you to tick a consent box, and tells you plainly that it sends the current view to our render service. Skip that button and nothing leaves your machine.

The geometry is accurate. The deck is built board by board from the dimensions you set, the cribs, piles or floats sit where they would actually sit, the square footage matches the compliance report exactly, and the boat lifts are modelled from RGC Marine's published frame dimensions — a VL80124T really is 133 inches across on screen because that is what the spec sheet says.

Materials, light and water are a faithful impression rather than a measured photograph. The cedar is real cedar colour and grain, but it is not your particular batch of timber, and the TimberTech colours are matched by eye from their swatches. Order a physical sample before you commit to a colour — no screen is a colour proof. Use the plan view for anything dimensional.

Nobody's in particular. It is a modelled Lake George shoreline — a rocky bank grading into a wooded hillside, with a bay and headlands either side and a camp up on the shoulder for scale. It is generated from a height function rather than photographed, which is why you can orbit right around behind the dock and the land is still there.

We used to let you drop the dock onto a photo of your own shoreline. We took that out: a flat backplate falls apart the moment you move the camera, and it was the one part of the tool that consistently misled people about scale. Send us a photo instead and we will tell you what actually fits.

Yes. Walk around gives you a free orbit — drag to swing right around the dock, scroll or pinch to zoom, and drop the camera to water level to see the crib timbers and stone fill below the deck. Stand on it puts the camera at eye height on the deck itself and walks you out toward the end, which is the honest way to judge whether a 40 ft walkway feels long. Both run on your own hardware in real time.

The 3D view is for judging how a dock reads — proportion, material, whether the boat house swamps the deck it stands on. The plan view is the one that matters for permitting — a scaled top-down drawing with your property lines, the 20 ft setbacks, and the footprint of every projection marked, which is essentially how the Commission looks at an application. If you export one thing to send us, send the plan.

The report tells you which limit and by how much. Usually it is surface area (reduce head width or depth first, they cost area quickly) or setbacks on a narrow lot. Remember that a lift or a moored boat counts toward the 40 ft overall width, so adding one can push an otherwise legal dock over. If you cannot make the shape you want fit, that is genuinely useful information and exactly the point at which to call us on (518) 260-9878 — there are often options the headline numbers do not reveal.

Yes. Switch on the boat house section and you get four roof styles, eight siding colours, six roofing choices, and the option of a rooftop sundeck with a stair down to the dock. The report checks it against the Adirondack Park Agency envelope — 1,200 sq ft footprint, 15 ft height measured from the deck it stands on, single storey, no sanitary plumbing — and warns you if it overhangs the deck underneath it.

That envelope interacts with the LGPC's 16 ft height limit for structures on a dock, and with APA jurisdiction on your particular parcel, which the tool cannot see. See our boathouse page, or ask us directly.

They are. We are an authorized RGC Marine installer, and every lift in the picker is a real RGC model with its published capacity, maximum beam, frame dimensions and lift travel — the Vertical Aluminum (VL) series, the Hydraulic Vertical (HVLS) series, the freestanding FLEX™ hydraulic range up to 36,000 lbs, the FLEX pontoon and tritoon lift, and the pile-mount hydraulic lift for boathouses and deep water. Canopies are RGC's Traditional and APEX styles.

Add a boat and the report sizes the lift against it — estimated rigged weight against capacity, and beam against the cradle. That estimate is deliberately conservative because owners under-guess displacement by twenty to thirty per cent routinely. Weigh yours before you order.

Pressure-treated pine and clear western red cedar, plus the full TimberTech range organised the way TimberTech organises it — by shade first (tan, gray, brown), then by colour within each. That covers the Advanced PVC collections (Vintage®, Landmark®, Harvest and Harvest+™) and the capped composite ones (Legacy, Reserve, Terrain®, Terrain+®, Premier, Premier+, Prime and Prime+®).

We are a TimberTech Silver Pro partner, so we can get you a physical sample of anything you see here. Do that before you commit — the renderer is good, but it is not a colour proof.