Building our dream home, from the ground up: Progress photos

It's been a while since I've updated, but we've made lots of great progress at our house. We met with our landscaper and devised a plan for the backyard. Since there's an elevation change of approximately 4 feet, between the front and back of the lot, we had to get creative in maximizing the usability of the backyard.

While I would've loved to have a completely flat backyard, I also know that there are so many ways to make a tiered yard beautiful. We just happened to attend a wedding last weekend where the garden of the home was built into a hillside. I took lots of pictures and collected lots of great ideas - everything from stone work to the contrasting color between groundcover and shrubbery. (A note to the bride & groom: if you're reading this: Congratulations! We love you!)

I've known our landscaper for 20 years, so I can personally attest to the quality of his work. One of the things that he included in his bid was the placement of drains throughout the backyard. If you're thinking of creating a tiered yard, I can't encourage you enough to make sure that your landscaper is familiar with drainage patterns and knows how to install the appropriate drains for the landscape. Since the backyard slopes into the house, it's really important to make sure that the yard is well drained so that we don't have an issue with flooding.

We decided to use rockery from Mutual Materials. While I would've loved having a natural stone (ie: boulders) for the retaining wall, it was cost prohibitive and our landscaper felt as though the large stones wouldn't necessarily stand the test of time. After looking through the color selections, we decided to use the Mutual Materials flat faced Manor Stone in "Northwest Blend."

Wanna know how much stone was delivered to our property? 32,000 lbs. Here's another crazy factoid: our landscaper and his crew of guys are moving all of the rockery by hand. In his words: "They built the pyramids by hand!" Very true, my friend...

A huge pile of crushed rock - we'll use this to surround the drains and the retaining wall

32,000 lbs of rockery

Mutual Materials flat faced Manor Stone in "Northwest Blend."

The stairs that our landscaper hand cut into the backyard. The pile of dirt at the top will be used to backfill the retaining wall, and then the top tier of the yard will be graded evenly.