No down payment. You pay when the project is finished.
Monday – Friday, 9:00 AM – 7:00 PM · Capitol Hill, Seattle
Hardscaping · Ballard
Ballard is unusual for Seattle on two counts, and both work in your favour. It is mostly flat, with real grade only on Sunset Hill and the drop toward Golden Gardens and the ship canal. And the ground is sandier glacial outwash rather than the dense till under most of the city, which drains noticeably better. That combination means less retaining wall work and more straightforward paving than we do three miles east, and it means permeable paving is genuinely worth considering here rather than being a specification that fails quietly. The constraint in Ballard is rarely the ground — it is the lot size and the access, on streets of narrow parcels with gates rather than driveways.
Paver apron and planted strip across the front of a house on an older residential street
What we get called about
Ballard is small lots and good drainage, which is close to the opposite of the rest of Seattle. The typical job here is not holding a slope or fixing a bog — it is making a compact rectangle behind a hundred-year-old house genuinely usable. That means more paved surface than people expect, a turf or lawn area smaller than instinct suggests, and enough planting depth at the boundary to make the space feel enclosed rather than merely small. The one real constraint is access: the older streets have narrow side returns and no off-street parking, so material handling shapes the schedule.
Worth knowing in Ballard
Permeable paving is worth a serious look here. The outwash actually accepts water, which is the condition permeable systems need and frequently do not get elsewhere in Seattle — and it can let you build more area within the impervious surface allowance on a small lot.
The method
The sequence does not change between neighbourhoods — what changes is the ground it is applied to. Full detail on the hardscaping service page.
Before anything is priced. Where the water arrives, where it currently goes, and where it will go once a few hundred square feet of ground stops absorbing it. On a sloping lot this changes the design, not just the drainage line.
Walls before paving, drainage before both, and anything needing machine access before the route in is closed off. A correct sequence is most of what keeps a multi-element job from costing twice.
Wall height, Environmentally Critical Area, impervious surface limits. Three elements each individually exempt can still cross a threshold together, and finding that out mid-build is the expensive version.
Excavation to the depth the use requires, compaction in lifts, and the drainage placed as the structure goes up rather than added at the end. None of this is visible when the job is done, which is why it is where a cheap quote saves money.
Paving, wall faces, caps, stone. The part everyone is paying attention to, and the fastest part of the job when the three steps above were done properly.
Edges, jointing, the soft landscaping back in, and the levels checked against where the water is meant to go. We walk the finished fall lines with you rather than asserting them.
What it costs in Ballard
Ballard paving prices at city norms, $20 to $50 per square foot, with a smaller drainage component than the till neighbourhoods need because the outwash takes water. The offsetting cost is access: on a narrow lot where everything moves by barrow, labour is a bigger share of the job than materials.
You pay after the project is fully completed.
The estimate you sign is the price you pay.
Spread the cost with no interest.
Covers hardscape work; vegetation excluded.
Local questions
General questions about this service are on the service page. These are the ones that only come up here.
Yes, noticeably. Much of Ballard sits on sandier glacial outwash rather than the dense till under most of the city, and water passes through it rather than sitting on top. That means shallower base requirements in some situations and a genuine case for permeable paving. It is not universal — there are till pockets — so we test rather than assume, but the difference from Wedgwood or Capitol Hill is real.
Better here than almost anywhere else we work. Permeable paving works by letting water through into a reservoir base and then into the soil beneath, which requires soil that accepts water — exactly what the outwash does. On a small Ballard lot it can also let you build more paved area within the impervious surface allowance, which is often the thing that makes a design work.
Yes, and a good share of Ballard work is exactly that. It changes the price rather than the possibility: spoil leaves by barrow, base material arrives the same way, and the job takes longer than one a machine can reach. What it does not change is the specification — the base still gets built to depth and compacted properly, because a hand-dug base that was skimped fails the same way a machine-dug one does.
Those are the parts of Ballard that behave like the rest of Seattle. Real grade means retaining walls or terracing with drainage behind them, and the four-foot permit threshold measured from the bottom of the footing applies. The ground up there is also more likely to be till than outwash, so the drainage assumptions that hold on the flat do not automatically carry.
Serving Ballard and surrounding neighbourhoods
Ballard Avenue · Sunset Hill · Loyal Heights · Whittier Heights · West Woodland · Adams · Crown Hill edge
98107 · 98117
Recent work
HardscapingView full sizeSegmental block walls terracing the grade at the front of a modern building, with a stone column, handrails to code and a paved approach — commercial hardscaping, where the walls have to take footfall as well as soil.
Retaining WallsView full sizeA wall run the whole length of a fence line to win back a flat strip of garden. Ballard lots are narrow, so the width this recovers is width the garden genuinely did not have.
WalkwaysView full sizeA side return too narrow for a full path. Large slabs floated in washed rock give a route through and let the ground either side carry on taking water.
Artificial TurfView full sizeArtificial turf pinned into a brick paver border so the edge cannot lift or curl. The grape trellis and the raised planter were part of the same job.
We come out, look at the ground, and put a fixed written price together. No deposit, and it does not change once agreed.
Free estimate
Three minutes on the form. We reply during office hours, Monday – Friday, 9:00 AM – 7:00 PM, and we come out and look at the site before quoting anything.
Or call (425) 331-9811
Thank you — we have your details. We reply during office hours, Monday – Friday, 9:00 AM – 7:00 PM. If it is urgent, call (425) 331-9811.
