Landscaping & Hardscaping in Auburn, WA

Auburn sits where the White River meets the Green, and that confluence shaped everything a shovel finds here. About five and a half thousand years ago the Osceola Mudflow came off Mount Rainier, filled the White River valley and spread across the flats that Auburn now occupies. Under the modern topsoil and river silt there is a stiff gray mudflow deposit that will surprise a crew that has only worked the Eastside. It bears reasonably well once you are into it, but the layers above it hold water like a sponge.

The city grew outward and upward in two very different eras. Downtown, Terminal Park and the streets around the BNSF yard hold the oldest houses, early 1900s through the 1940s, on small platted lots with mature maples and shallow utilities running everywhere. Then Lea Hill and West Hill came into the city in the 2008 annexations, bringing a huge stock of 1980s and 1990s subdivisions plus the newer plats around Green River College. South of the river, Lakeland Hills was master-planned on the plateau in the late 80s and kept building for thirty years, which is why so much of it is on graded pads with engineered fill and short, steep side yards.

What Auburn homeowners call about depends almost entirely on which of those they live in. Valley-floor customers want to stop standing water. Their lawns squelch from November to March, the raised beds rot out, and the patio they poured in 2005 has settled unevenly because the soil under it was never stable. We answer that with grade, a drainage plan, and often a patio raised slightly above the surrounding lawn on a deeper base with separation fabric. Planting there leans on species that tolerate wet feet: red twig dogwood, carex, salal, and vine maple set on small mounds rather than in a sump.

Hill customers want the opposite. Lea Hill and Lakeland Hills lots often fall six to twelve feet from the house to the back fence, so the usable yard is a strip. The work there is terracing: an engineered segmental block wall with geogrid tied into the slope, block or slab steps to make the lower terrace reachable, and a patio cut into the new bench. Access is the real variable. A lot of those plats are on narrow streets with tight side-yard gates, and whether a machine fits determines both the schedule and the price more than the block choice does.

We draw the plan in-house and our own crew performs the hardscape, which is why the wall section on the drawing matches what actually gets buried. Nobody hands the excavation to one company and the block to another. From our Kent shop, Auburn is about twenty minutes down 132nd or SR 18, close enough that a second pallet of block or another load of drain rock is a short run rather than a lost day.