Provo, Utah
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Grading, drainage and retaining walls for Provo yards, from sloped Edgemont and Rock Canyon lots to wet Riverbottoms ground, built to Provo City's permit rules.
“The team painstakingly put in a retaining wall that will stand for a hundred years.”
“I will be using them for all of my landscape needs, a pleasure to work with!”
Grading and Retaining Walls in Provo
A retaining wall on the Provo bench and a drainage fix in the Riverbottoms are two different jobs, even if they land on the same invoice line. Up in Edgemont and Rock Canyon, the ground is gravel and cobble that washed out of the canyons long ago, and the lots tilt hard toward the lake. Down near the Provo River it is flat clay with water close to the surface, and the problem is water that has nowhere to go.
Walls in this town usually fail for boring reasons: no drain rock behind them, no pipe at the base, or a footing set right in wet clay. Some fail on paper first. In Provo, a wall under 4 feet, counting its buried footing, does not need a building permit but still has to meet zoning setbacks. Over 4 feet, the city wants a building permit, a site plan and engineered plans. Bigger cuts on hillside lots can also bring in a grading permit from the City Engineer.
We grade the whole yard before we talk about wall block. We figure out where the water comes from, what the neighbor's yard is sending onto yours, and where it can leave. Once that is settled, Jackson lays out walls and terraces that fit the slope and the code. You end up with flat ground you can use, instead of a hill you mow sideways.
Provo runs from the Utah Lake flats up to the Rock Canyon bench, so one side of town is heavy clay and the other is gravel, and the yard has to be built for the ground it actually sits on.
Know your Provo ground
The Provo challenges
East-bench yards in Edgemont and Rock Canyon can drop several feet from the back door to the back fence. Carving a flat yard out of that means cutting into gravel and cobble that will not hold a vertical face for long. Big cuts can also pull you into Provo's hillside rules, which govern slope protection and stability on hillside lots.
On the valley floor, clay soaks up water and gets heavy. Behind a wall with no drainage, that wet clay pushes harder every spring until the wall leans or bellies out in the middle. Freeze-thaw makes it worse, because water trapped behind the block expands on every cold night of the winter.
Provo measures its 4-foot permit line including the footing, which is buried about 30 inches down. So a wall that shows only a couple of feet above the lawn can already be close to the line. Build it taller without a permit and you may be tearing it out later, at your cost.
Plenty of older Provo homes, in Franklin and around downtown, have yards that settled flat or even back toward the house. The yard can look fine and still be sending spring melt into the window wells. Nobody notices until the carpet in the basement corner is wet in March.
The J&H approach
Before any block shows up, we measure the grades across the yard and mark where water comes in and where it leaves. We set a slope away from the house, plan swales and drain lines, and only then decide where walls belong. A lot of walls get shorter once the grading is right.
Every wall we build gets clean drain rock behind it, a perforated pipe at the base that runs to daylight, and fabric that keeps the clay out of the rock. The base is compacted gravel, never native clay. Taller walls get geogrid tied back into the slope.
If a wall crosses Provo's 4-foot line, or the grading needs a permit from the City Engineer, we bring in an engineer and handle the paperwork before we dig. We confirm current rules with Provo City Development Services on every wall, because code changes.
From our job sites
Short videos from real J&H job sites. Tap one to play it with sound.
What homeowners say
"We had a really big project (full lot project) and a crazy timeline, and Jackson and his team were awesome. They are very efficient, work hard to get things done quick, and the quality of their work is top-notch. Great company. Great guys. I would highly recommend them for any landscaping needs."
"Jackson and his crew did a phenomenal job on our back yard. I had a vision and they brought it to life. We had them do a retaining wall, grading, underground trampoline, sprinkler system, and sod. They met deadlines, communication was on point, and the whole crew was friendly.…"
"…The job was completed quickly without sacrificing quality, and the results exceeded our expectations. We would absolutely hire this team again and recommend them to anyone looking for landscaping help."
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