Even though our house is 40+ years old, little if any landscaping was done around it. The previous owners had used it as a summer home, their permanent home being in Brooklyn, NY. I suppose if you grow up in Brooklyn you are used to asphalt (AKA black top).
The area around the house was paved so that the asphalt was right up to the plywood sheathing. This likely caused many of the rot and infestation problems because the wood wicked up the moisture when it rained.
One of the other problems this house had is the drainage around the foundation. The house had no gutters on it and the ground in the back yard gently sloped right into the foundation. That caused the basement to flood any time we received more than 1/2 inch of rain. Yet another discrepancy on the “Property Disclosure Statement.”
To solve all of this, I started by putting up the gutters. Then I rented an excavator (Cat 303) from the Taylor Rental center here in town. I dug up all of the asphalt path and patio and dug trenches to put drain pipes in for the gutters and surface drains. These pipes empty out in the front yard on the down hill side of the house about 15 feet away from the foundation. That solved the drainage problems, but now I had piles of torn up asphalt and dirt in the back yard. It was a mess. It stayed that way over the winter.
As soon as the ground dried out enough to start digging, I began phase II. The first thing I did was haul away all the asphalt piles. There was a recycling center the accepted construction and demolition debris. They took the asphalt and recycled it by reheating it and adding some more tar and gravel. Now it is somebody’s driveway or road instead of taking up space in a land fill.
Next I began digging out the area from the foundation out to 10 feet away. I tried to dig this so that the ground sloped away from the foundation. To the north of our house in the woods there is a great glacial rock pile (also known as talis). From this pile and from one of the old stone walls I pulled rocks and built a dry fit stone wall about 3 feet high and 45 feet long. I used the dirt that I dug out to back fill the stone wall and create a swale. Now the water runs down the back yard into the swale and away from the house into one of the surface drains I put in last year. I did this in 15 foot sections, planting grass on each section after I graded it out. To get the arc for the curve I used a 12 foot piece of rope staked to the ground. I stretched this out and marked the ground with a sharp stick, then dug along that line.
I built a trellis using Black Locust tree trunks. I have access to a good supply of these trees free for the taking. Black Locust is very dense durable wood. It is rot and insect resistant. I was planning to grow grape vines on the trellis and would rather not use pressure treated lumber since it leaches chemicals into the soil. The trellis is 18 x 20 feet and about 9 feet high. The holes for the support posts were dug 4 feet deep to get below the frost line.
After the trellis was complete I used a roto tiller to loosen up the soil and then graded it out so that is sloped away from the house toward a drain placed in the curve of the stone wall.
Finally I purchased 4 pallets (1 ton per pallet) of “Blue Stone” This was rough cut slate stone quarried nearby. It took two weekends to lay the stone path and 25 x 25 foot patio. We plan to plant some filler plants in between the cracks of the patio stones, so I tried to leave between 1 to 2 inches for the plants to grow.
Before and after pictures. The total cost for us was $300 per ton of blue stone, $40 for the delivery and about $20 for four grape vines, so around $1,260. That and many many hours of digging, hauling, lifting, raking, more digging and did I mention digging?
beautiful job, the patio is lovely.
Thank you! It is one of the nicer things about this house.
[...] one about installing our well pump, that our house was previously surrounded by asphalt. Not one to question anyone’s taste in landscaping schemes, but paving over half the property did seem a little [...]