Mill Creek was laid out as a planned city: curving streets, townhome slopes, golf-course edges, and lawns that were meant to look trimmed from the day the house sold. The soils are the soils of a graded subdivision, and the rain is the same county rain that finds every low corner. A boulder wall on a townhome patio can look like it was delivered to the wrong house. We use it when the grade and the house can take the mass.
Snohomish County · ZIP 98012 · 2020 population 20,799
Rock only where it fits the street
Often the better small wall here is block, and we will say that. When the lot backs to a greenbelt and the grade is real, rock is the right face. It still gets a buried base and a drain. The greenbelt will shed water at the back of the wall forever.
We keep the ends finished so you are not looking at a cut soil bank beside a tidy yard.
The ground in Mill Creek
The expectation here is a clean edge. Lawns get mowed on a schedule, aerated before they mat down, and fertilized lightly enough that we are not just feeding the moss. Townhome and hillside lots need low walls and tight paver work more than they need a big landscape renovation. Bark beds are there to keep the mulch line straight and the weeds out of the front that faces the street.
We still find the same drainage mistakes as everywhere else: downspouts tied to nothing, and patios pitched back at the siding. The difference is that a small failure shows, because the rest of the street is kept. Native shrubs fit the greenbelts behind the houses. A tropical plant list does not survive the first wet winter, and it will not match the neighborhood even if it did.
How we do the work
A rock wall is dry-stacked or lightly set, with the weight in the stone and the drainage in the voids. It is not a veneer glued to a failing timber wall. We use rock big enough for the height, with a face that leans back into the hill, and smaller rock locked behind so the soil does not pipe through.
Good rock work looks heavier at the bottom. If every stone is the same patio-sized block, it is not a wall, it is a stack. We source local stone and we will tell you when the access cannot take the boulder the job wants.
What we look at first
- Height and whether it is structural or a garden edge
- Machine access for real boulders
- The soil behind: clay that needs a drain, or rock that already sheds
- An existing wall we are tying into
The base course
The biggest stones, buried, on compacted rock or competent ground. If the first course is the one you can see sitting on the grass, the wall is already failing. You should see the second course at grade, not the bottom of the first.
Tying into old rockery
We can often continue an existing rockery if the old base is still honest. If the old wall is tipping, we take it down and use the good stone again. Matching a lean is how you extend a failure.
What it will not do
A rock wall will not hold an engineered height it was not built for, and it will not stop a landslide. Past a certain height we involve an engineer or we change the grade so the wall can be shorter. That conversation happens before the stone is ordered.
More from this crew
- Rock walls across Snohomish County
- Retaining walls in Mill Creek
- Gravel installation in Mill Creek
- Landscaping in Mill Creek
- Hardscaping in Mill Creek
- Rock walls in Bothell
- Rock walls in Lynnwood
- Rock walls in Everett
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.
