Why Fall Is a Good Time to Build in New England

By late September a backyard goes quiet. The furniture gets stacked, the grill comes out less, and the patio that carried the whole summer sits empty most evenings. That quiet is usually when a homeowner decides the yard needs real work, and it is also when most people talk themselves into waiting for spring. Waiting is not automatically the better call. Fall hands a hardscape project a few things that June cannot, and the work that honestly belongs on next year's calendar is easy to name.

An empty yard is the easiest yard to build in

A patio, a wall or a new front walk is construction. Material comes in, a crew works across the property, and the space is a job site until the last sweep. In July that runs straight through the months you own a backyard for. In October it runs through a yard nobody is sitting in anyway. Nothing about the work itself changes. What changes is what the work interrupts. J&E builds in house, so the crew that opens the ground is the same one that sweeps up at the end of each day. Fall simply puts that stretch of work where it costs you the least.

Stone keeps a different calendar than the growing season

A property carries two kinds of work and they answer to different things. New lawns, garden beds and plantings are living work. Every plant gets chosen for the light and the ground it will sit in, and a new lawn has to take before it can hold. Patios, walkways, steps and retaining walls are stone, block and paver, set on ground that was prepared to carry them. The hardscape half of a yard answers to the ground rather than to the growing season, and that is the half with room in it once the summer is over.

A wet October tells you where the water goes

Every rainy week this time of year is information. Walk the property while it is coming down and the low spots announce themselves: the corner that stays soft, the step you have to hop over, the run of lawn the water crosses instead of leaving. Take a photograph while it is wet. A picture of standing water is worth more to whoever plans the grade than a description of it in April. Water that keeps coming back to the same spot is a drainage question rather than a weather one, and it can be fixed. Setting the grade right is the work that comes before any stone goes down, and it is far easier to specify while the yard is still showing you the trouble.

The plan is the part that never depends on the weather

J&E does not draw landscapes. J&E builds them. When a landscape designer or an architect hands over a plan, the crew builds it to spec, and a homeowner who has no plan yet gets connected with a design partner. All of that runs on its own clock. Drawings, materials and scope get settled while the ground is cold, so a conversation that starts in October is a project with its paperwork behind it rather than in front of it.

The weather sets the deadline, and it moves

Nobody in Massachusetts publishes an end date for the building season. The ground stays open until the cold closes it, and how far into the year that runs is different every year. What still fits this season and what moves to the spring list is a question answered standing in the yard, not read off a calendar. J&E walks the property and builds the estimate from what is actually there, which is where a real answer to that question comes from.

Lawns and beds are the work worth holding for spring

Some work is worth holding, and it is worth being straight about which. A new lawn wants conditions that let it take hold. Beds and plantings are chosen for the sun and the soil they will live in, so they do better going in with the growing season ahead of them. Mulch gets refreshed in spring or in fall and the yard cleanups run in both, so the care side of a property is never the thing that decides when the stonework happens.

Fall work buys you a finished spring

The real choice is not build now or build later. It is whether the first warm Saturday next year finds you looking at a finished patio or looking at a plan. A yard that gets built through the fall is a yard that is ready when you want it, not one waiting on a crew in May.

Look at the walkways, patios and walls J&E has already built, then request your estimate or call 781-608-4425.