# Lushlife's Tahoma 31 backyard reno Lawn Journal



## LushLife18 (May 10, 2021)

Well, it has been a long time in the planning, and I've learned so much from this forum, so I thought I'd share my lawn renovation journey - the good, bad and ugly!

We moved to this new home in March 2022. After walking the backyard for the first time, it was clear that it had a few issues but also lots of potential. The main problems were poor drainage and some haphazard landscaping with a few trees that were rotting out. In addition to causing a safety hazard, the trees and their landscaping islands really constricted the yard, leaving very little usable space.


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## LushLife18 (May 10, 2021)

I got to work planning the renovation. The main goals were to fix the drainage issues and to increase the usable area for my kids' sports activities (soccer, football, baseball etc).The backyard area to be renovated is about 10K sqft, and has the unique "feature" of having a culvert running under the yard on a diagonal, routing a creek underneath our property. The culvert consists of two large HDPE pipes, about 6 feet across in total, the top of which are buried just a little more than a foot under the surface.

Ensuring that we didn't disturb this was a key part of the regrading plan. I hired a contractor experienced with drainage improvement jobs in our area.

While waiting for their scheduled start date, it was prep time for me. I had my tree guy clear out the big trees (a couple of which were rotting out and becoming safety issues) and also moved a few thousand landscaping rocks that a previous owner had decided would work better than grass.

With the trees gone, the backyard looked even worse, and was still holding staying wet and holding water.


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## LushLife18 (May 10, 2021)

The week finally arrived for the contractor. The plan was to add 20-28 cu yds of soil for the re-grading, some of which would be harvested from my hillside behind the area being renovated, to raise the level 2-3" as needed. After the re-grade, they would install a thick layer of McGill Compost and then install the sod.

Will update this post with pictures and textual additions soon!


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