Walter, his son and Samuel and all the crew at Seattle Eastside Pavers were excellent to work with and did everything they promised, and more. I have to say that my project was large and somewhat fluid as I changed the design and added to the scope of work as we progressed. The house is a typical Wallingford house, built in 1922, on a small hill, 6 or 7 feet above the street, with the old two concrete path driveway to a garage in the back. I built a brick patio with railroad tie retaining walls in the back yard when I bought this investment property 25 years ago. I also did a lot of other remodeling and updating work on the house back then. The place has been continuously occupied as a rental for 25 years and it needed some love, again. The steep yard in front was weed infested, the parking strip similarly unattractive except for two nice trees. The driveway concrete paths were broken and it was a mud puddle in winter. The brick patio needed serious tuck pointing, at minimum and the timber retaining walls were rotted. Originally there was a concrete retaining wall between the property and the northern neighbor. Years ago, we replaced about 2/3 of that wall with a block retaining wall.

For SEP, the entire project included removal of the front concrete steps and walkway to the front porch, the two driveway concrete paths, the backyard brick patio and timber retaining wall and last 50' of concrete retaining wall between my property and my northern neighbor. Walter and his crew created a beautiful new retaining wall in the front yard at the sidewalk (eliminating the steep yard), block stairs and a paver walkway to the front porch. They created a paver driveway which flows beautifully to the new front yard stairs and walls. The paver driveway now flows seamlessly into the new paver patio. The patio is surrounded on two sides by a new 3' high retaining wall into which they built a little stairway into the raised bed planting areas. They replaced the old concrete retaining wall between my northern neighbors and I with a block wall to match that which my neighbor and I had partially replaced years ago. Finally, in the parking strip in front of the house, Walter and crew placed 2' x 2' pavers. I now have a beautiful and extremely low maintenance, landscaped and hard-scaped property that receives complements daily! I will post pictures soon to show the extent of the work. (Just to give an idea of the scope of this very large job, total cost was approximately $52,000. It was a very complicated job, and quoted at much higher prices by others.)

As much as I love the results of the work Walter and Samuel and their crew did, the best part of the project was getting to work with them. They are great people! Walter gave me quotes for the work up front, and they were very competitively priced. I got quotes from 3 companies for the initial scope of work. Because my project wasn't entirely designed at the start, he gave me prices per square foot for pavers or walls, as well as linear foot prices for cap stone on walls, in case my final design ended up being larger or smaller than we estimated originally.

There was no designer involved other than me and Walter's crew, who know what they are doing. We worked with only a few drawings done by me, which were more suggestions than final designs. Using these few sketches, or nothing at all, I talked it through with Walter, his son or Samuel, working as the project progressed always arriving at a design that would work. And, there were MANY changes along the way as I learned from them what was possible, and we always found an attractive solution. (In the interest of total truth; this work was done on a rental house in Wallingford that I have owned for 25 years. I live only 5 minutes away and work from home. I was available on short notice for consultations with Walter or the others to keep the project going, and to make decisions regarding design ideas / changes. This probably helped keep things moving. Though, if you have a complex, fluid project, meeting only once a day in the morning should be sufficient to keep your project going.)

Walter and his crew always showed up when they said they would, worked extremely hard, and did very precise, clean work. Every day, they left the job site as clean as possible and at the end of the project, left the site cleaner than when they arrived.

Finally, these guys are smart, have a sense of humor and are fun to work with. They are professionals who know their business. They work hard, do high quality work, and it is their clear and stated objective to make every customer happy. Well, they certainly achieved that objective with this customer. I will never look further than Seattle Eastside Pavers for any future work I need done.

I will try to get the leaves cleaned up and post some pictures later this week, because it is beautiful! Thank you Walter and Samuel and the entire SEP crew! - Joe