📍 Case Study · Littleton, Colorado
Retaining Wall, Pavers & Sod: A Multi-Element Backyard Built in the Right Order
This Littleton backyard needed more than one fix. The grade had to be held, the patio base had to be right, and the lawn had to go in last — not first. Multi-element projects fail when trades work out of sequence. Here, one owner-led crew planned and built all of it as a single project.
The scope
- Engineered retaining wall to hold the grade and create usable flat space
- Paver base and banding, compacted and set to drain correctly
- Fresh sod installed last, over prepared soil — not construction traffic
- Clean transitions between wall, pavers, and lawn so the yard reads as one design
How we built it
Order is everything on a build like this. Excavation and wall footing first, then the engineered wall, then base compaction for the pavers, then irrigation, and sod dead last. Because one crew ran the whole sequence, the finished elements never got driven over, dug up, or redone.
The result
A backyard that was a slope you looked at is now flat, structured space the family actually uses — engineered to last through Colorado’s freeze-thaw seasons, with a lawn that went in healthy and stayed that way.
Complete outdoor living projects like this one begin around $35,000. If your yard needs structure — walls, patios, grading, lawn — we design and build the whole sequence, from first sketch to final stone.