Mountlake Terrace is mid-century houses on city lots, with newer buildings near the transit line. The slopes are gentle, the soils are compacted, and the yards were not designed for the amount of roof water a remodels-worth of downspouts can dump. City walls are often on the line, under a fence, with the neighbor’s grade on one side. We locate the line and the utilities before we excavate.
Snohomish County · ZIP 98043 · 2020 population 21,272
Short walls, close to the property line
A two-foot wall that lets you flatten a side yard is a common city job. It still gets a base and a drain. Skipping them because the wall is short is why the fence above it leans in year five.
Machines may not fit. We bid the hand work if that is the access. A price that assumes a skid steer in a four-foot side yard is a price we will miss, so we do not write it.
The ground in Mountlake Terrace
Lots are modest. A patio, a small lawn, a side yard that has become a moss strip, and a fence that is older than the owners. That is the usual visit. The soil has been walked on for sixty years. Aeration and dethatching change the lawn more than a bag of seed thrown on top.
Where the lot tips, it tips a little, and a low wall or a re-graded swale is enough. We are not cutting roads into a mountain. Pavers get people off the mud by the back door, and a pressure wash takes the black film off a walk that has not seen sun all winter. Plantings should stay in scale with the house. A hedgerow that needs a lift every year is the wrong tree for a forty-foot lot.
How we do the work
A retaining wall is a structure. The part you see is the block, the boulder, or the timber. The part that keeps it standing is the base, the batter or the geogrid, and the drain rock behind it. We do not stack block on the sod and call it a wall.
Height decides everything. A low garden wall and a wall holding a drive are not the same detail, the same permit, or the same price. We measure the retained dirt, not the face you wish it were.
What we look at first
- Retained height, at the tallest point
- What is above the wall: a lawn, a drive, a house
- Water coming down the slope
- Access for block or for boulders
Block, rock, or timber
Engineered block is predictable and what we use when the height or the permit wants an engineered system. Boulders fit the foothills and the older yards. Timber is a short-life choice in the wet, and we will say how many years you are buying.
The base
Compacted rock, buried enough that the first course is not sitting in the organic layer. A wall is not a stack. If the base is soft, we dig out and replace it. There is no fabric or foam that fixes a bad base.
What changes the price
Height, length, access, how much soil we have to move, and whether the wall holds a car or a flower bed. We measure those. A per-foot number shouted from the sidewalk ignores the tallest bay, which is the bay that costs the money.
More from this crew
- Retaining walls across Snohomish County
- Rock walls in Mountlake Terrace
- French drain installation in Mountlake Terrace
- Hardscaping in Mountlake Terrace
- Patio installation in Mountlake Terrace
- Retaining walls in Lynnwood
- Retaining walls in Edmonds
- Retaining walls in Brier
Sources for the climate and the water
- USDA plant hardiness map for choosing plants that can take a Snohomish County winter.
- EPA WaterSense on watering less once a lawn or a new planting is established.
- EPA Soak Up the Rain on keeping roof and yard water from becoming someone else’s problem.
