Eastside
Landscaping & Hardscaping in Kirkland, WA
Quick answer
Kirkland runs from an 1888 mill-town street grid at the waterfront up a steep slope to the Rose Hill and Finn Hill plateaus. Narrow old lots, teardown rebuilds and a strict tree code shape most projects here. We build walls, patios, fences and irrigation in Kirkland, about thirty-five minutes from Kent.
- From our Kent shop
- about 35 minutes
- ZIP codes served
- 98033, 98034
- Licensed in WA
- Bonded & insured
In Kirkland the street grid tells you the lot size before you get there. Peter Kirk platted the town in 1888 around a steel mill that never really ran. His surveyor laid out a tight grid of narrow lots with alleys behind them. Norkirk and Market still have that geometry. A lot of the older houses sit on one or two combined 50-foot lots. The useful back yard ends up around twenty-five feet deep, and the alley is the only sane way to bring in material. That alley helps us. It is often the difference between a machine dig and three days of wheelbarrow work.
The rest of the city arrived in pieces, and those pieces still behave differently. Houghton was its own town until it merged in 1968. Its lake-facing slope is full of 1950s and 60s houses, and plenty of them are getting rebuilt for the view. Juanita, Finn Hill and Kingsgate sat in unincorporated King County for decades. They only came into the city in 2011. You can still see the county-era infrastructure out there. Roadside ditches instead of curb-and-gutter. Downspouts dumping straight onto the turf. Drainage that was never tightlined anywhere. Rose Hill sits up on the plateau, mostly 1960s ramblers with a steady stream of infill mixed in.
What people ask for splits along the same seam. In Norkirk and Market it is small-yard maximization. A paver terrace that uses the whole rear setback. A cedar fence tall enough to deal with the new house next door. A narrow side path from the alley to the front door that is still walkable in February. Up on Rose Hill and Finn Hill the lots are bigger. There the ask is usually drainage, a lawn that survives the fir shade, and a wall that turns a sloping back third into flat usable ground. In Houghton and on the Market slope it is terracing for a view. Steps that turn a hillside into somewhere people will actually walk down to.
The digging tells its own story. The plateaus are Alderwood till with a hardpan a shovel bounces off. Winter water perches on it, runs sideways and finds the low corner. The lake-facing slope is the classic Puget Sound stack, permeable sand sitting on dense till. That is why seeps show up partway down a bank. It is also why the city maps landslide hazard along much of that face. The Forbes Creek and Totem Lake basin is peat and soft organic ground, so a patio base there gets over-excavated. Then there are the rebuilds. Any lot redone in the last fifteen years usually has eighteen inches of imported fill on top, compacted by a track hoe, with construction debris mixed into it. That is a completely different material from what the neighbor two doors down has.
Kirkland takes trees seriously. Removal needs a permit and the city holds you to minimum retention standards. So we work out where a wall footing or base section lands relative to a protected root zone before anything gets drawn as final. Irrigation is worth a mention too. Finn Hill and Kingsgate are on Northshore Utility District water, not City of Kirkland, and the meter and cross-connection requirements differ between them. Every system we install gets a backflow assembly and a test either way. For planting we stay with material that takes deep shade and wet winters. Sword fern, salal and evergreen huckleberry under retained firs. Hydrangea and Japanese maple where there is filtered light. Lavender and hebe on a sunny Market slope. Carex and red twig dogwood along a Juanita seep line. One more thing on the lake-facing slope in Market, Houghton and along Juanita. Geologically hazardous area review can require a geotechnical report, and that report decides where a wall can sit.
Ground conditions in Kirkland
Kirkland climbs from Lake Washington at sea level to about 400 feet on the Rose Hill and Finn Hill plateaus. That climb is steep enough that the city maps landslide and erosion hazard across much of the lake-facing slope in Market, Houghton and along Juanita. Up top the soil is Vashon till, Alderwood series, with cemented hardpan usually 18 to 36 inches down. Winter water perches on it and runs sideways instead of soaking in. On the slope itself the failure mechanism is the standard one for this shoreline. Permeable outwash sand over impermeable till, groundwater coming out at the contact, and a bank that creeps after a wet January. The Forbes Creek corridor and the Totem Lake basin are old wetland ground. Peat and soft organic silt, poor bearing, high water table. Juanita Bay and the creek mouths bring wetland and shoreline constraints on top of that. Kirkland has also seen heavy teardown and rebuild activity. A large share of city lots carry one to three feet of imported, heavily compacted construction fill over whatever the native profile used to be. We probe for it before we price a wall.
Permits
Kirkland does its own permitting through Development Services at City Hall on 5th Avenue. A retaining wall over 4 feet from the bottom of the footing to the top needs a building permit with stamped engineering. Tiered or surcharged walls usually get evaluated together as one structure. Kirkland regulates land surface modification separately too, so grading and fill volumes have their own thresholds independent of the wall. The tree code is one of the stricter ones on the Eastside. You need a permit to remove a regulated tree, you have to keep a minimum tree density on the lot, and replacement planting is typically required. That makes root-zone impacts from excavation a real design constraint. Geologically hazardous area review applies across much of the lake-facing slope and can require a geotechnical report. Waterfront and near-shore parcels sit inside shoreline jurisdiction, which has its own rules. A large patio or driveway can push past the drainage review threshold and trigger stormwater review. Standard residential fences within the height limits generally do not need a permit, though sight-distance rules still apply at corners and driveways. Thresholds move. We confirm the current ones with the city at permit time.
Neighborhoods we work in
- Norkirk
- Market
- Houghton
- Juanita
- Rose Hill
- Finn Hill
- Kingsgate
Services we offer in Kirkland
Kirkland: common questions
My Norkirk lot has an alley. Does that make the job easier?
Usually yes, and it can move the price a fair bit. The 1888 plat left alleys behind most of the older Kirkland grid. An alley gives us somewhere to stage base rock and pallets of block. It also lets us bring a mini excavator into the rear yard without threading a side gate. Without alley access on a 50-foot lot, that same patio turns into hand work with a buggy. Longer, and more money. We look at the approach on the first visit.
Will Kirkland tree rules stop me from building a patio?
Rarely outright. They will shape the plan though. Kirkland requires a permit to remove regulated trees and holds a minimum tree density per lot. In practice the thing that bites you is root protection, not removal. We keep footings and base excavation out of the critical root zone of the trees you are keeping. Where we have to get close, we use a floating base section. All of that gets settled on paper before we submit anything.
Why does my Finn Hill yard drain worse than my neighbor down the hill?
Finn Hill sits on till with a hardpan close to the surface. Rain that lands on it does not go down. It goes sideways until something intercepts it. Finn Hill also came into the city in 2011 after decades under King County, and a lot of that area still runs ditch-and-culvert drainage with downspouts spilling onto the lawn. The fix is three things. Tightline the roof water. Give the perched layer a real outlet. Then grade the finish surface with honest fall on it instead of leaving a flat plane.
The house was rebuilt recently. Does that change how you build?
Yes. A recent rebuild usually means a foot or more of imported fill compacted by heavy equipment, sometimes with construction debris in it, sitting over whatever was there before. That fill can be excellent bearing. It can also be inconsistent junk. From the surface the two look identical. So we test-dig before we price a wall or a driveway, and the base section gets designed against what is actually down there.
How far is Kirkland from your Kent shop, and do you do weekly mowing there?
About thirty-five minutes outside of rush hour, straight up I-405. We do installation and renovation work in Kirkland all the time. Same with irrigation start-ups and fall blowouts, which we batch with other Eastside stops. Weekly mowing we keep closer to Kent. Sending a crew across the valley every week is not honest pricing for either of us.