Landscaping & Hardscaping in Des Moines, WA

Des Moines is old by South King County standards. It was platted in 1889 and incorporated in 1959. The lot pattern still shows it. Original platted lots run 25 and 50 feet wide. Some got combined over the years. Plenty didn't. Streets just dead-end at the top of the bluff. The housing runs from 1920s and 1930s waterfront cottages along Marine View Drive, up through 1950s and 1960s ramblers on the upland, then 1990s townhomes and 2000s infill around Pacific Ridge and the Marina District. Nothing here is a uniform plat. So we build a Des Moines bid off a site visit. A square-foot table won't get it right.

West of Marine View Drive, the bluff governs everything. The stratigraphy is the classic Vashon sequence. A cap of dense glacial till, advance outwash sand under that, Lawton Clay at the bottom. Rainwater works down through the sand. It hits clay it can't pass. Then it comes out sideways at that contact. Where the groundwater daylights is where the bluff face slides. You can read the history in the leaning alders below Woodmont and Redondo. So on the west side of a Des Moines lot, a wall or a cut or any new concentrated surface water is a geotechnical question first. Hardscape second. We say that at the walkthrough. That beats pricing it like a normal wall and finding out later.

Views drive the design brief here. It's the opposite of what we get asked for in Federal Way or Auburn. Half the reason people bought is the water, Maury Island, the Olympics behind it. So the instruction is almost always to keep everything low. Seat walls at 18 inches, not privacy screens. Planting that tops out below the sightline from the deck. Evergreen structure matters just as much. A Des Moines yard gets looked at from indoors four months of the year, so it had better read well in February. Salt narrows the plant list on top of all that. At Woodmont, Redondo and Salt Air the southwest wind carries spray. Kinnikinnick, salal, evergreen huckleberry, hebe, lavender and carex hold up on an exposed bluff-top lot. A hydrangea that would be perfectly happy in North Hill burns brown on a windward corner.

East of Marine View Drive the city flattens out. North Hill and Zenith sit on the same Alderwood till plain as Kent West Hill, so the work is more familiar. Patios built over compacted till. Sprinkler zones trenched through shallow sandy loam. Short cedar fence runs between close neighbors. Here the constraint is access, not geology. The older streets are narrow. On-street parking is contested. A lot of these houses have one driveway spot on a grade. We plan material staging, excavator delivery and haul-off around the street on day one. A dump trailer can't just live at the curb for a week. On the tightest lots we phase deliveries so the neighbors keep their parking.

Two practical notes. Water across most of Des Moines comes from Highline Water District. So the irrigation meter and its backflow assembly get permitted through the district, not City Hall, and the annual test runs through the district too. Second, the shop is close. Fifteen minutes west on Kent-Des Moines Road. Our crew, the mini excavator and the next pallet of block show up without a travel day attached. That matters more than it sounds when a bluff-side job has a short weather window. Blue Landscaping Services has been licensed and bonded in Washington under BLUELLS880K2 since 2012, and the hardscape install is done by our own people.