We are now nearly done with the landscaping. The shots with dead grass, above and below, were taken in April 2005, and the pictures below with green grass were February or March.

When we remodeled the house, we didn't have any money left to do the landscaping. Every so often, we'd talk about it, but that was as far as anything got. Then we went on the Willo Home Tour in February. And when Leisa saw all the fabulous backyards, she decided we needed to do something.

Here's what the yard looked like a few months ago.

We wanted a seating area away from the house, with a path leading to it from the house.

The yard needs a tree or two.

Sparky! dug this hole one day after it rained and the ground was muddy.

Leisa is annoyed with me for getting the paint on the shed.

So it's a couple of days after the Willo tour, and I got the phone book out and started calling landscape companies. After calling a bunch of people, we ended up with about five companies that came out. I told them we wanted sprinklers, grass, trees, concrete border, and a patio or seating area. The dining patio is also a bit crowded, so we wondered if there was any way to move the dining set around. Also, the block fence, although fairly well constructed, isn't that great looking. It's just a gray lasso around the yard. I didn't want to see it. How can we cover it up? They'd listen to us, go sit in their trucks, and then come back with a price. One guy, I'll call him "Enrique" because I can't remember his real name, told us with this European accent, "I give you border with boulder. I give you gravel. Leetle dog, you train him to go on zee gravel. You only need grass where your feet gonna touch." And then he pointed down the side yard and said, "your feet not gonna touch there. You put gravel." Thank you. Drive through.

Dude, look around this neighborhood. How many "borders with boulders" do you see? We wanted someone who would look at the house and give us something that matched the style of a 75-year-old house, rather than a big drywall barn in Arrowhead.

Jim told me that he had been to Landscape Mart on Thunderbird Road, and that it was pretty cool. It was a showroom for landscaping materials: stone, gravel, pavers, ramadas, waterfalls, putting greens, plants, etc. Leisa and I went up there, and she made an appointment with a landscape designer. And that's where things turned to crap.

I like the big, green wall that mature oleanders give, except I don't like oleanders that much. I want the feel of a cloistered garden, which would screen out the view of the freeway and the yards on the other sides. I wanted an inviting space where you could take the paper on Saturday morning and be comfortable drinking a beer while I read the paper. Leisa wanted to hide the gas meter and the shed, and have flower beds and borders.

We took some pictures of the house and drove the twenty miles to Landscape Mart to meet with our designer, Mary. We tried to explain what we wanted and were immediately frustrated, or at least I was. I would say "ficus," and Mary would say "hibiscus." Or "nasturtiums" or "jimson weed" or "ponderosa pines." I asked Leisa later if I had a speech impediment; did I mumble or stutter. Why was this woman having such a hard time understanding what we wanted? And there was no explanation to accompany the suggestions. No, "you know, ficus is a nice tree, but it has these drawbacks, and as a result, we typically don't recommend it for home landscaping. We suggest these trees as an alternative." No. I say "ficus;" Mary replied "eucalyptus." It was very frustrating. Oh, we gave her a $250 retainer for our frustration.

This was in March. The date on our first set of plans was March 23, 2005.

I'm going to digress a bit, but constant readers shouldn't be too surprised by that. We started working with Bob and Terri back in 2001 or 2002. They came to the house and looked at it. They talked to us about our needs in the remodel. They measured. Then they came back to us a couple of weeks later with three ideas. One was turning the attic into livable space. Another was turning the garage into a guest house. A third was to put the master suite into the basement. We liked the basement idea, but my initial intention was to add on to the addition to the original house. Leisa wasn't sold on that, and we spent six or eleven months discussing their ideas and saying "what if."

We finally started wondering how things would change if we demolished the addition, called them back, and that's when things took off. We'd meet with Bob and Terri on Friday morning, and we'd discuss the plans and make tweaks, such as getting rid of the old bathroom and turning it into a pantry/storage room. Or, "let's burgle a little bit of space from Brittany's closet so we can put a linen closet in the upstairs bathroom." It was a discussion. "No, you shouldn't do this because...," or "it might be a good idea to...." It was NOT frustrating.

Back to Mary. We wanted to get away from the "patio attached to the house" concept, and use all of the yard. Done right, this is a 2500 square foot outdoor living room. We wanted a place to sit at the back of the yard. I didn't just want to throw some flagstone down, I wanted a sense that you were physically moving into a different area. The first set of plans called for an elevated area for the table and chairs, then a patio in the back corner of the yard. We would then use the dining patio for Adirondack chairs. We put the table out in the yard, and all of a sudden, it became the focal point of the yard: this $500 Target table set. It didn't work. Also, the entire focus of the yard was on the east side. There was no balance. Ixnay on the elevated patio. We then thought about the seating area, and dipping it below ground level a bit, to set it off from the rest of the yard. We didn't want to build it up, as we figured we'd be looking over the fence into Roberta's yard.

Back to the comparison. Bob and Terri didn't have an agenda. They wanted to design the best house they could (within our budget, of course). Although they knew what looked cool, they weren't constantly trying to sell us on granite counters when we asked for Formica. And therein lies the fundamental difference between an independent designer and Landscape Mart. Mary The Designer was also Mary The Salesperson. Hmmmm. They want someplace to sit? I know! A gazebo. With a little cafe table in the middle of it. And it just so happens that we partner with someone who sells gazebos and cafe sets.

That is soooooo not what we envisioned in the yard. "Well, we'll bury it two feet so it's below grade," was the response. So you're going to take a 30" railing and put 24" below grade, and the seven foot high roof is now going to be sitting five feet above ground? It's a little toadstool at the back of the yard. Not to mention that you can't get any furniture, such as a couch and chairs, into it. We should have cut our losses and walked away then. But we didn't.

We kept going around and around with regard to the design of this thing. Again, I'd say eight inches, it would be designed at two feet with steps down. There was a wall on top of it that Leisa referred to as "the little racetrack." Make it big, slightly below ground, pavers, and even with the grade. It took us weeks to get that.

Weeks. Let's talk about the timeframe. Mary is sitting there with a computer on her desk and a big-ass CAD program. When we were designing cabinets, Ramy would make changes as we watched. Discuss, change, repeat. With Mary, though, we would discuss the current iteration of the plans, then she would schedule another appointment, usually two weeks away so she could make the changes. When we got there, it always felt like she was cramming for a test. She hadn't done anything for two weeks, and she'd better take fifteen minutes and get something going before we got there. And it showed.

As I mentioned earlier, we also wanted to balance the yard, so that there was stuff happening on the west side besides simply the shed. We thought a couple of Adirondack chairs under a trellis might be nice. Landscape Mart partners with someone who sells Alumawood, so that was the material from which the pergola would be constructed. It was about $1500. When Leisa found plans in a woodworking magazine and asked about doing it in wood, the price skyrocketed to $5000. It was $300 worth of materials, max, and a half-day's labor, depending on how much beer I drank while reading the paper. Yet they wanted five grand? It was insane, and Leisa told Mary that. "It did seem a bit high," was the response.

We kept talking about plants, and I kept hearing everything but ficus. Finally, I looked up "ficus hedge" on the internets, and found some site in Florida talking about what a pain the ficus hedge was. This was months later, on my own, that I got any sort of idea that they may not be that great. I was ready to explore other options, but now, ficus has appeared in our drawings! But only on the east side. The west side was oleanders.

At some point, I think everybody got tired. We had a set of plans we weren't in love with, but we were tired of driving out there to make teeny changes. We asked how much it would cost to install all of this. And we waited some more. The answer was always, "it's in 'Estimating' and they're really busy." Leisa finally called and told Mary we'd like a set of plans. She finally brought them to us at the end of July. Five months after we first started working on the backyard. Five. One. March. Two. April. Three. May. Four. June. Five. July. And she still didn't have a number. I'd have guys come and look at the yard and they'd have a number in writing fifteen minutes later.

So we had our plans. Back to the phone book. I called about eight companies, five of whom returned my call and set up appointments. One guy kept calling to reschedule, and I finally got tired of it and never called him back. So we talked to four landscapers.

I got several copies of our plans and waited for our appointments. When we met with each landscaper, we described the situation with Landscape Mart, told them we weren't thrilled with the plans, and if they had any suggestions for improvement, we'd like to hear them. The first two guys suggested minor things. Both noticed that although Mary had trees, she didn't have any ground cover in the gravel around the trees. Good point. Do it. The first two guys bid the plans exactly, and both came in within a grand of each other at about $32,000. It took one guy 30 minutes to give us that bid. He sat on the patio and wrote everything down. The other guy came back about three days later. It didn't take either of them two months.

The third person we met was a chick named Kim. We explained the situation with Landscape Mart, and she told us she used to work there. We showed her around, talked to her about what we wanted. She barely looked at the plans. Leisa mentioned we would have a fountain, and Kim took off. She was from the farm, and to her, a fountain sounds like a cow peeing on a rock. What we really needed was a waterfall. And it just so happened that she had some brochures and a DVD. The waterfall would tumble into a stream, which would end in a koi pond. There would be a little bridge over the stream, where we could sit and relax, dangling our feet in the babbling brook.

Let's look at the lot again.

In this nice 49' by 49' square of land, where would the most natural place be to locate a waterfall, stream and koi pond? If your answer is "no place," you're in agreeance with us. And yes, I did make that word up. And the pond and waterfall would run about $40,000 to start. That's one-fourth of what we spent on the entire remodeled house two years ago.

Thanks, Kim. Have a good life.

The last guy we met with was Steve, from Goodman's Landscaping. Bingo.

We talked with Steve and both liked him right away. He looked at the place, looked at the plans, listened to what we wanted, and then took off to go work on it. He called us a couple of days later and set up an appointment for Saturday to go over things.

That morning, we all went into the kitchen and clustered around the counter peninsula. Although he had our plans, he unrolled a different set that he'd done himself. The only difference between Steve and Babe Ruth was that Steve didn't have any stands to point to before he knocked it out of the ballpark. He grokked what we wanted to do, and his design reflected it. We spent several hours discussing the finer points, and just like with Bob and Terri, he'd make notes on his design, we'd add things, modify things, or he'd pull out a sheet of paper and sketch an idea, such as how the water feature would look. Within a day or two, we had a plan and a set of work notes, and Steve had a check. That was Labor day weekend. We were on the schedule to start construction the first of October. By Columbus day, we were nearly done. One month from plans to sod.

And his design looks nothing like the original; nothing like we discussed, yet it's everything we wanted. Bob and Terri listened to us, and gave us a fabulous plan for the house. Ramy would call me during the week and tell me that he'd been thinking about the cabinet design, and that he had a few suggestions on how they could work better. Same with Steve. These people do this for a living, and know what works on a project.

On the other hand, Mary simply put our ideas into the CAD program, only she changed the trees around.

To top off the whole Landscape Mart experience, I was doing the detail painting on the shed one Friday afternoon in late September, the weekend before the backyard was supposed to start. When we had the shed built, we didn't get them the paint in a timely manner, so the shed came painted beige. The paint's been in the shed ever since. I rented a sprayer and painted the light green color one weekend, and was finishing the dark green trim. I could hear the phone ringing inside and asked Brittany to go answer it. She handed it to me, and what to my wondering ears did I hear, but the voice of Mary. "Hi, this is Mary from Landscape Mart."

"I haven't heard from you in fer-effing-ever," is how I started the conversation. She either didn't hear or chose not to respond to my lapse into the vulgar colloquiate.

"Surprise, surprise. Estimating has just come back with a number on your plans."

 "Mary," I told her, "we've gone with someone else and we're scheduled to start next week." And I hung up the phone. My guess is that Kim, who used to work for Landscape Mart, said something to someone, "I looked at plans you guys drew, they want to get this done," and a month later, we had a timely bid from McKeown LLC.

Anyway, one month from plans to sod. After Steve designed it, Goodman's built it.