Over the past year, many friends and neighbors like Patrick Moore and Jim Catella of the Manhattan Beach Botanical Garden adopted the plants and large stones from our yard.  As a result we managed to divert tons of material from the landfill.  Thank you!

But we still had a few hard to adopt very large plants in the front yard.  At the last minute Chris Miller from The Beach Reporter, Scott Powell, President of Earthclub and the City of Hermosa Beach rallied to find and a place on the city’s greenbelt and move those plants to that new location.  See photos below. It was an incredible effort.

At that point the trenching begins.  By code we have to underground the electrical, cable and phone to the house when doing this type of renovation.  To avoid breaking up the perfectly good concrete in front of our house, we decided to relocate the meter box and trench the front yard to the side of the house.  While we have the trench open, we can also replace the sewer line and add irrigation and lighting.  We love twofers!

As you can see from the photos, there is a lot more dirt that came out of the trench than we expected.  It reminds us of the really big snows when we were kids back east.  Carter loves it.

In the meantime, Marcela Oliva, Architecture Professor at LA Trade Tech College and her wonderful students are finishing up the landscape/ hardscape plan with our contractor Fred Koch of Koch Development and his team.

We feel fortunate to have really good people working with us on this project.  It would be impossible otherwise.

Tags: Case Study, Community, environmental, Landscape

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