Walkways and steps, make it possible to move through your landscape with a sense of ease and comfort. Your landscape’s paths not only get you from point A to point B, but they also have a sensory component to them as well. As you move along that beautiful stone pathway you are surrounded by an ever enhancing landscape, of garden sounds and smells. The garden that your Walkways and paths are in become a valuable resource, by enlarging your homes living space and enhancing the quality of life. By placing gardens, patios, and walkways around your home, you are creating a quality environment that will play an important part of any home. Walkways connect your home to its surrounding and expand and increase the value of the your property, while providing you with a way of moving through your landscape. To create a truly beautiful, and successful Walkway there are a couple of thing that you will want to consider. Every walkway has a starting point and an ending place, but what you see and feel along the way will define how successful you are in creating a beautiful walkway. If a walkway is particularly long you may want to build into it some points of interest, one way you can do this is to build curves into the walkway that stop along the way at a point of interest, like a garden bench or water feature.

Steps are also be an important part of building a successful walkway through your property this is especially true here in the Seattle area. It’s a rare house that can be built on a truly level piece of ground. So very much of our landscaping has to be done on lots that have hills or slopes to them. This is when we can combine a set of off setting steps climbing up the hillside in back or our garden. By off setting the steps we can improve the beauty of the walkway and lend points of interest, or a place to stop and sit a while as we enjoy our garden and walkway. Building steps that go with your walkway can be a challenge in that steps that are climbing up a hillside need to be sturdy and stay in place, in our wet weather that we have here in the Seattle area. The best looking and most natural steps will be dry laid steps, there are several types of material that you can build them with. In most cases they are either built with large flat stones, precast concrete, or landscape timbers, these all need to be carved back into the hillside were there weight and gravity will keep them in place.

Whenever we are talking about walkways, paths, or steps we have to include walls in our landscaping plan. Walls are a natural point of interest as they run along our walkways and paths. They can be freestanding walls that provides a beautiful border to our walkway, or they can be retaining walls that will help hold the hillsides in place, next to the steps as they climb up the hill and through the garden. On steeper hillsides you can build multiple retaining walls that can form a series of terraces that will create a gradual transition from the top of your lot to the bottom. Now that we are at the bottom of the walkway and maybe just off the backside of the house, we find the perfect place to build our beautiful stone patio. A patio is a great place to spend time with family and friends in the great outdoors, my favorite type of patio is a sunken patio. A sunken patio can be combined with a on grade patio, steps, and retaining walls for special look that only a two tiered patio can have. If you were able to do a little pre-planning you placed the patio with a southern exposure, and will be able to capture the warming ray of a winter sun. masonry-contractor-bellevue