Week 2 begins with rock wall building and forming for a concrete wall. This is a different style of rock wall than we usually install. It’s inspired by the homeowner and the designer Scott Mantz. There’s a little more natural feeling and flow to this retaining wall. We salvaged stone from the existing stone wall and added Bandera granite as well as igneous river boulders for a rounded, natural look. Rubble from the demolished concrete wall and concrete walkway are used as free draining fill behind the wall along with 3″ spawl (angular stones).

- keith

Removal of concrete and excavation for a new retaining wall has begun at Keith’s Capitol Hill project.  With Scott Mantz as the designer, We set out on our quest for a garden makeover. Some unintentional pruning of the street tree was the only side effect of having an excavator on site (knock on wood as the excavator is still there). Otherwise using the jackhammer attachment for the excavator was good fun for Justin and Matt.

Matt Eads, owner of Terrain Build is getting this one going for us and Ken will be taking over in a week or so to start installing the pavers and irrigation system.

Can I just say that our clients are the best? We renovated their backyard in 2006 so it’s a pleasure to see them and to see the kids, who were just babies when we were last there. They’ve really sprouted up!

Late January came again to the Avalon crews, which meant it was Keith’s birthday and time to jump in the cold water.  Do you recall last year’s plunge?  We painted our backs and stuck this image on Valentine’s Day cards to our past clients – the Avalon Alum.Last year at that same time, we were building a landscape for Kira and Chris in Washington Park that included a sport court.  Here is a photo from last winter.

This year, Kira and Chris let us return to their yard to play some basketball as a warm up to our jump off the dock just down the hill.  It was a blast!  Lots of fun to go back and use something we built.

So after us managers got beaten up by the crew (the trash talking all week was a much tighter match than the actual game), we went down to the home of another Avalon Alum in Madison Park to test our fortitude.  We don’t have any photos but Ken set up his camera so here is a 1:20 clip of a bunch of guys trying to pretend that really cold water is our natural element.

Behind and below the house we are installing a stone retaining wall with stone steps and a fountain.  The excavation was performed by Dan with CK Excavation and the concrete work was done by Spencer with Bayshore Concrete.  Both guys do great work and are great to work with, which certainly benefits our work.Adam with Zuber Polymers provided the waterproofing of the fountain, and some great advice for our custom applications.

There are going to be a series of walls in this area, some as a mortared veneer and some dry-stacked (our challenge is to make the veneer appear dry-stacked).  Like the previous walls on this project, we are integrating about 30% of the sandstone that was salvaged from the previous house together with 70% of the beautiful brown stone from Montana near Trout Creek.

Jesse has installed our custom reservoir for the fountain and is building the stone up to our spillway.

After years of wearing green and yellow, we have decided to update our look.  Those are some good looking fellas!

Jesse and Rick have begun setting the steps underneath our rain/snow protective structure.

Sure was nice to be working under a tent last week!

Here is an update on the wall we were working on the last time I posted.  We have been working on many other features of this landscape, and I figure I will showcase some of them as we go along.  So let’s check out the granite steps.  We needed 14 step risers to negotiate the slope and we were able to find our bottom three steps out of one stone, and the remaining 11 steps came from another stone.  Pretty cool.