Church: Rock Around the Block

Home Portfolio Church: Rock Around the Block

This home’s patio and garage would flood after every rain storm. In addressing this, the homeowners were looking for a natural and lived-in feeling that harmonized with the house’s Tudor revival style and which could be enjoyed by grandparents and grandkids alike.

The biggest challenge presented 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. The previous patio had suffered constant flooding as the patio sank over time and there was no point for water to exit. The backyard was also being overloaded with stormwater as runoff from the surrounding neighbors would flow into their yard along with their roof downspouts.

Our solution was all natural stone, plus bricks salvaged from old Kansas City streets. Over 1400 bricks were scrubbed clean of grit and asphalt to renew their look. We used split stone and a custom tinted mortar mix to match the stonework on the home’s exterior. With these materials, we built 65 feet of continuous wall to form a raised bed that now contains the driveway and guides people down the new salvaged 120sf brick path to the gated backyard. There, we installed a custom cut 450 square foot bluestone flagstone patio bordered with more salvaged bricks and joined with impervious polymeric sand. We added a turfed berm along the patio edge to prevent lawn runoff from reaching the patio.

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. We worked 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.

Since the existing plantings were mainly boxwoods, yews and arborvitaes, flowering perennials and shrubs were introduced to add the missing color the yard needed. We focused on 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.

The back patio is now welcoming for grandparents and grandchildren alike. Overall, the homeowners have gotten an upgrade that honors tradition and celebrates today.

Church: Rock Around the Block

Church: Rock Around the Block

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