There’s a retaining wall and a short (but steep) hillside in our front yard that turned to weeds. There were also drainage problems, with one portion of the yard (up to the foundation) under about 1/2 inch of water during a hard rain. Add to that bad/broken irrigation and leftover pipes and valves from earlier irrigation systems connected to who-knows-what. It was time to fix the problems and make the yard look nice.

We talked with a few landscape architects and picked an all-in-one company: they are landscape architects, landscape contractors, and general contractors. They started with a property survey to get elevations. The architect took the survey results, marked it up, took lots of pictures, then went away for about 6 weeks. He came back with a design which only required a few minor tweaks to make into something we believed we’d like.

Demolition of the existing landscaping started Feb 24, 2000. These pages show the progress, from starting point to eventual ending.

Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
Week 8

Week 9
Week 10
Week 11
Week 12

Week 12
Week 14
Week 15
Week 16

How did it turn out?

So how did it turn out? We’re mostly happy. Here are some of the ‘finished’ pictures. Well, close to finished. There are still some railings to be added and we’ve commisioned a sculpture for the front. More later.

The last three pictures show the railings we were waiting for. The sculpture for the front is described here.