Landscaping & Hardscaping in Renton, WA

Renton has more real slope than most of South King County. It shows up in every estimate we write. The Cedar River runs through the middle of town on its way to Lake Washington, and the ground climbs away on every side. The Highlands plateau sits to the northeast. Talbot Hill is a steep ridge south of downtown. Kennydale is up on a bluff above the lake, with I-405 carved into the slope underneath it. So on a Renton walkthrough we don't start with materials. We start with how far your lot falls and where the water is already going.

The houses here come from a lot of different decades. The Highlands started as wartime defense housing, thrown up fast in the early 1940s for Boeing and PACCAR workers. Plenty of that footprint is still standing behind newer siding, on flat pads with almost no original drainage. Kennydale is mostly 1950s and 60s ramblers. There's a steady run of view-driven remodels up there, and that's where we get the most calls for terraced walls and a level patio cut out of a slope that wants to stay a hillside. Benson Hill came into the city with the 2008 annexation and brought 1970s and 80s subdivisions with it. Maplewood Heights and Tiffany Park are newer, tighter plats. The builder graded those pads, and the retained side yards are already thirty years old.

Renton has two regulatory overlays a national franchise won't know about. Parts of the city sit above abandoned coal workings from the Renton and Talbot Hill mines. The city maps those as coal mine hazard areas, and certain excavation in them can require a special study first. Then there's the Cedar Valley aquifer, which supplies the city drinking water. It's protected by mapped Aquifer Protection Area zones. Inside the stricter zone there are real limits on how deep you dig and real paperwork on where imported fill came from. Neither one stops a normal back yard. We just check the parcel map before we price it, not after we dig.

Most of the work here is grade work. Say your back yard drops eight feet from the house to the fence. Cut it into two benches and it becomes usable. An engineered block wall with geogrid tied back into the hillside. Block or slab steps down to the lower terrace. A paver patio on the flat you just made. Kennydale bluff lots come with view constraints, and the equipment has to come down a driveway that was already steep in 1962. Downtown and Maplewood lots near the river sit on old floodplain deposits. Get the drainage sorted there before anything gets poured.

Planting follows the exposure, not a catalog. Japanese maple and dwarf conifers where a Kennydale view lot wants some structure without blocking anything. Sword fern and evergreen huckleberry on the shaded north side of a Highlands lot. Lavender and hebe on the dry south face of a Talbot Hill terrace.