Front yard regrade, start to finish

Most of a landscape install is the part nobody photographs. The finished bed gets the picture. The three days of stripping, grading and raking that decide whether the finished bed sits flat do not.

So here is the middle of one.

Strip first

The turf comes off before anything else. Spreading soil over existing grass gives you a lawn that settles unevenly for two years and a bed edge that migrates. It has to come out, and on anything larger than a patch that means a machine.

The tracked mini skid is the reason a job like this takes a day instead of a weekend. It also spreads its weight over tracks rather than tyres, which matters on a lawn you intend to keep.

Then the grade

Grading is where the job is won or lost. Water goes where you point it, and you are pointing it for the next decade. Away from the foundation, off the walkway, toward wherever it can actually soak in.

A machine gets the grade close. A rake gets it level. There is no version of this where the rake is optional.

Boulders last

Stone gets set after the grade is right, not before. Set it first and you end up grading around it, which is how boulders end up looking dropped rather than placed.

A note on this particular job: this is my own property. I am showing it because it is a complete sequence I could photograph at every stage without asking a client to have a camera in their yard for three days. The work is the same work.