It was supposed to be a domestic place of rest; a brick patio and attached garage, basic and serviceable. Instead both of these spaces flooded after every rainstorm, making them inhospitable and unusable. Our goal was to revamp the space completely to harmonize with the home’s Tudor revival style and combat flooding for years to come.
Combatting low-points in the soil and drainage issues throughout the process, we tore out the existing path and patio and raised the grade of the space, hand-scrubbing old bricks from Kansas City streets for a fresh look and installing them with carefully selected blue-stone flagstone. The resulting revamped patio was stunning, but we didn’t stop at the hardscapes; since the existing plantings were mainly boxwoods, yews and arborvitaes, flowering perennials and shrubs were introduced to add the missing color the yard needed, and performed some serious drainage rerouting to prevent flooding in the future.
The back patio is now abundantly welcoming for grandparents and grandchildren alike, just as our client hoped!
HSB Concrete built the new concrete driveway, Ksquared Landscapes built everything else.
Handscrubbing bricks? Drainage rerouting? It’s all well and good to keep things brief, but we’ve left out some incredible details along the way. Let’s start from the top.
The biggest challenge we encountered was working with an extremely flat site for the patio and walkway that was right at grade with an exposed foundation, all of which was also the low point of the back yard and surrounding neighborhood. The previous patio had suffered constant flooding as the patio sank over time and there was no point for water to exit.
Our solution was a continuous 65 ft wall, establishing a raised bed to contain the driveway and guide visitors down a newly salvaged 120sf brick path to the gated backyard. Over 1400 bricks were scrubbed clean of grit and asphalt to renew their look for the brick path! We used all-natural split stone and a custom tinted mortar mix for the wall, to match the stonework on the home’s exterior. Next, we installed our custom-cut 450 square foot bluestone flagstone patio, bordered with more salvaged bricks and joined with impervious polymeric sand. We then added a turfed berm along the patio edge to prevent lawn runoff from reaching the patio.
As for the drainage issues, we routed 100% of the roof runoff towards the front lawn where there was ample space for the water to infiltrate. We accomplished this first via drainage pipes under both patios and the driveway, working in concert with the concrete contractor to install subsurface pipes for routing downspout water to a distant lawn emitter. Second, along the home’s less accessed south face, we removed an old brick path and put in a 40ft long dry stack stone retaining wall, and a dry creek bed dressed with Colorado river rock.
As for the landscaping, we focused on incorporating native plants like coralbells, coneflowers, butterfly milkweed, royal catchfly, spiderwort, indian pink and witch hazel. During our work we had also discovered statuaries among the existing plantings that we cleaned up and placed in the new garden bed, much to the homeowner’s delight!
