Hardscaping contractor for Seattle and the Eastside

Everything in a garden that is built rather than grown: paver patios and driveways, retaining and seat walls, walkways, steps, stone and brick masonry, fire pits and fireplaces, and the drainage underneath all of it. The counterpart is softscape — lawn, planting, soil, trees. Most gardens need both, and the usual order is hardscape first, because it involves machines, excavation and changes to where water goes, none of which you want happening after the planting is in.

Per square foot, between $18 and $120 depending which element you mean — walkways and driveways at the lower end, natural stone masonry at the top, patios and walls in between. As a whole project, a single element on an accessible flat lot can be $8,000–$15,000, and a full garden across three or four elements on a slope is typically $25,000 to $120,000. The three things that move a quote most are access for machinery, how steep the ground is, and how much of what is already there has to come out first. We quote fixed, and there is no deposit.

Drainage, then whatever is structural, then the surfaces. That order is not a sales preference — it is that each one is buried under the next. Putting a patio down before fixing where the water goes means lifting the patio to fix it later, and building a wall after the paving means bringing a machine across the finished surface. If the budget covers one phase now, the right phase is the one that is underneath, and we will quote it so the later phases connect to it rather than requiring it to be redone.

It depends on the element and often on the total. A retaining wall is exempt only if it is four feet or lower measured from the bottom of the footing, outside an Environmentally Critical Area, and causing no damage to adjoining property. Paving generally does not need a construction permit but can run into impervious surface limits on a small lot, and that limit counts your patio, driveway and walkway together rather than separately. The case that catches people is three individually exempt elements that cross a threshold combined. We check the parcel once for the whole job before quoting.

Usable outdoor space is worth more here than a decorative one, which is a Seattle-specific answer: a flat, dry, covered-or-not area that works nine months a year reads as extra room, and a steep unusable bank reads as a problem the buyer inherits. The elements that hold value best are the ones that fix something — a wall that makes a slope usable, drainage that stops a wet lawn, a driveway that stops breaking up. The ones that hold value least are highly specific installations built to one person's taste. We will tell you which half of that a given idea falls into.

Landscaping is the whole garden; hardscaping is the built half of it. A landscaper who only does softscape will plant around a drainage problem rather than fix it, and a hardscape contractor who does not think about planting leaves you with a lot of paving and nowhere for water to go. We do both, which mainly matters in the sequencing — knowing that the irrigation line crosses where the wall footing goes is cheaper to know before the footing is poured.

Yes, and most of our higher-value work is exactly that — Magnolia, Queen Anne, West Seattle, the north-end bluff streets. A steep lot usually wants terracing rather than one tall wall: two four-foot walls stepped apart generally cost less than a single eight-foot wall, avoid the engineering and permit the tall one triggers, and leave usable ground between the levels instead of a cliff. Where the lot sits in an Environmentally Critical Area the four-foot exemption stops applying and the process takes longer, which we will tell you before quoting rather than after.

A single patio or one wall is typically one to two weeks on site. A multi-element garden is three to six weeks, and the variable is almost never the visible work — it is excavation, disposal, and how much base has to be built. Access is the other big factor: a job a machine can reach moves several times faster than one where everything is barrowed through a side return. We give you a week-by-week sequence with the quote, not just a finish date.

Concrete pavers and natural stone both do well; the failures we are called out to are almost never the material. They are the base under it and the drainage behind it. Permeable pavers are worth considering where impervious surface limits are tight, because they can let you build more area within the same allowance. On shaded north-facing ground anything smooth gets slippery with algae, so texture matters more than it does in a sunnier climate, and sealing is maintenance rather than a one-off.

Yes — common-area paths, entrance walls, parking and walkway repair, and multi-year programmes for associations. The work is the same; the difference is documentation and scheduling around residents rather than around one household. See HOA and association landscape management for how those are quoted and run.