Hardscaping in Mount Baker

As many as buys the usable area you actually want, which is a budget question more than a technical one. Each terrace is a wall plus the fill and drainage behind it, so level ground here is bought by the square foot rather than found. The useful exercise before design is deciding how much flat space you genuinely use — people frequently find two generous terraces beat four narrow ones.

It removes the four-foot exemption, so a retaining wall of any height may need a permit, and depending on the situation the design may need engineering input. A meaningful number of Mount Baker parcels fall inside one. It does not make a project impossible — we work on these lots regularly — but it changes timeline and design, and it is far cheaper to know at the quoting stage than halfway through an excavation.

Only where horizontal space is genuinely too tight to step back — a narrow side return, or a boundary you cannot build into. Everywhere else terracing wins on this hill: two four-foot walls generally cost less than one eight-foot wall, avoid the engineering and permit the tall one triggers, give planting space between levels, and keep the lake view that a single tall wall would wall off.

Through your garden, unless the design gives it somewhere better. Water from the ridge above concentrates as it comes down, and hardscape that interrupts that path without providing an alternative tends to find out during the first serious storm. We design the drainage route for the whole slope first and fit the terraces and paving into it, which is the opposite order from how most people assume it works.