Landscaping & Hardscaping in SeaTac, WA

SeaTac incorporated in 1990. The airport is the reason. People living around the field wanted a say in land use, so they made a city. It's about ten square miles, and a very large share of that is Port of Seattle property. What's left is residential, in bands wrapped around the airfield. Riverton Heights and Bow Lake sit at the north end. McMicken Heights runs along the eastern shoulder above the Duwamish valley. Angle Lake and Madrona Park are south. Tell us which band your house is in and we already know most of what we need before the walkthrough.

The housing is modest and mostly mid-century. Small wartime houses. Ramblers from the fifties and sixties on seven to ten thousand square foot lots. Plenty of them have been in the same family for decades. There's a big rental and small-landlord share too. Whole blocks are also just gone. The Port bought and removed hundreds of homes in the 1980s and 1990s under the noise remedy and third-runway programs. North SeaTac Park is what came of that. You can still read the old street stubs and driveway aprons in the grass. The light rail station at South 200th opened in 2016 and townhomes have filled in around it, on parcels that used to hold one house and a big back lawn. Angle Lake is the exception to all of it. Small kettle lake, ringed with docks. The lots are short and pitch straight down to the water. Almost nowhere to swing a machine.

Under the sod it's Vashon till, 350 to 400 feet of elevation. Figure two feet of Alderwood gravelly sandy loam over a cemented hardpan your shovel rings off. Around Riverton Heights you'll hit pockets of looser Everett gravelly sand where outwash comes through. People hear sandy loam and expect drainage. What they get is a perched water table and one corner of the yard that stays soft from November to March. The lakes here are relict glacial kettles in closed basins. Angle, Bow, Tub, Lora. Ground near them holds water higher and longer than the map says. That matters for footings, and it matters for what lives through a winter in the low corner. Two buried surprises come with this housing vintage. Abandoned septic drainfields, on streets that got sewer late. Steel heating oil tanks under 1950s houses that converted to gas. We probe before we trench. Finding either one with an excavator bucket is an expensive way to find it.

You can't talk about a SeaTac yard without talking about the airfield. It shows up three ways. Height first. FAA obstruction surfaces and the city airport height provisions limit tall objects under the approach corridors. The Port runs an obstruction program and has topped and removed trees in those paths. So planting a Douglas fir that intends to be a hundred feet tall under a final approach is just buying a removal bill later. Second, wildlife. FAA guidance discourages bird attractants close to an airfield. On the parcels nearest the fence line we keep big fruiting masses and open standing water off the plan. A pondless basalt column or a recirculating fountain does the job instead. Third, noise. Here we'll be straight with you. A solid cedar fence and a dense evergreen screen really will cut tire and traffic noise off International Boulevard or Military Road, and they change how enclosed a yard feels. No hedge stops a 737 at fifteen hundred feet. We say that on day one instead of selling planting as a sound wall.

What people ask for here is practical, not showy. Privacy fencing is the single most requested item in the city. Usually cedar. Usually along an arterial, or along a shared line that lost its 1970s posts in a south wind. Front yards on rentals that have to stay low maintenance. A back patio sized for real family gatherings, which in SeaTac often means the paved area matters more than the lawn. Repairs on sprinkler systems that went in during the seventies and eighties, before backflow prevention was standard. One wrinkle at street level. A lot of SeaTac roads never got curb, gutter and storm pipe. Runoff still moves in roadside ditches. So a new or widened driveway crossing one needs a right-of-way permit and a correctly sized culvert. Filling the ditch isn't an option, however tempting it looks. Blue Landscaping Services carries Washington contractor registration BLUELLS880K2, a $12,000 bond and $1M liability coverage. From the Kent shop we're fifteen to twenty minutes out.