How to Use the Winter to Get a Spring Project Ready

Every backyard project has two halves. One of them is construction, and that half belongs to the warm months. The other half is a pile of questions: what the space is for, who drew it, what it is built from, and where the water goes. Those questions are answered at a kitchen table, and December through March is the quietest stretch of the year to answer them. Projects that start cleanly in the spring are almost always the ones where the winter did that work.

Begin with how the space gets used, not with what gets built

The most useful thing a homeowner can bring to a first conversation is not a picture of a patio. It is an honest account of how the yard gets used: how many people sit out there on a normal Friday, whether meals happen outside or just drinks, whether kids need a flat run to play on, whether the grill is a habit or a hobby. A patio gets sized and shaped around the way a family entertains, so the answer to that shapes everything after it. Work it out in January and the rest of the project has something to be measured against. Write it down while you are at it. A page of plain sentences about how a family uses a backyard is worth more than a folder of saved photographs.

The drawing is somebody else's trade

Worth being clear about, because it changes who you call first. The drawing of a landscape is not J&E's trade. The building of it is. The crew works to the plan a landscape designer, a landscape architect, a design firm or a home builder puts in front of them. If you already have that plan, it gets built to spec. Without one, J&E puts you in touch with a design partner. Either way the drawing takes time that has nothing to do with weather, and the winter is exactly when that time exists.

Materials are a slow decision, so make it slowly

Pavers, bluestone and natural stone each sit differently next to a house. Pavers repeat in a set pattern and give you consistent color. Bluestone cuts into clean squares and reads more formal. Natural stone comes irregular and fits an older property. Steps can be built in stone, brick or paver, and a wall can go up in natural stone, in block, or in block with a stone face. All of it holds up through the seasons here, so what decides it is the look you want to live with. A sample square also tells you less than the same stone laid across a finished yard, which is worth remembering when two options feel close. That is a better conversation with a cup of coffee in February than with a crew waiting in the driveway.

Water belongs in the plan, not in a conversation halfway through

The grade and the drainage are the work under everything else, and they come first for a reason. Build a patio, a wall or a lawn over ground that sheds water and it stays where it was set. Build the same thing over ground that holds water and it will not. Winter and early spring are when a property shows you the truth about that: where the melt collects, which corner stays soft, what happens by the back door after a storm. Bring those observations into the plan and they get solved by the grade instead of by an argument in June.

Decide the pieces that have to line up together

Some parts of a yard cannot be planned separately without a seam showing. Steps get built into the walk so the two of them arrive as one approach instead of two jobs. Stone around a pool is set while the pool itself is built, so the terrace and the coping meet properly. Lighting, plantings, walls and patios all read as one space when one plan covers them, and like five separate jobs when it does not. Those decisions cost nothing in the winter and cost real money once a crew is on site.

A cold yard still shows you what it is

Snow hides the grass. It does not hide the slope, the trees, the sun angle or the way the house sits on the lot, and none of that changes between February and May. J&E walks the property and puts the estimate together from what is actually there, which works perfectly well in a jacket. Walking it in the cold also means talking about next year while there is still time to change your mind.

Come spring, the yards that get built first are the ones where all of this is already settled. If you want next season to start with a crew rather than with a conversation, request your free landscape consultation, or call J&E at 781-608-4425.