Mid-century houses deserve better than a cracked concrete pad
Doraville’s Northwoods Historic District is 530 acres of 1950s modern and contemporary ranches, designed by Ernest Mastin and John Summer and built between 1950 and 1958, and it went on the National Register in 2014. Oakcliff and Tilly Mill are the same era. The houses are good; the yards mostly got a concrete slab out back in 1956 and nothing since. We replace the slab with a patio that fits the house, fix the drainage the slab was hiding, and plant something that will still look right in twenty years.
We’re based in Dunwoody, ten minutes up Tilly Mill Road. Everything we run is electric and charged by solar on the trailer.
Call (404) 369-0989 or book a free site visit.
What we build in Doraville
Paver and stone patios. Clean-lined paver and bluestone patios that suit a mid-century house; no fussy patterns. Paver Patios
Front walks and steps. Low, wide steps and straight walks in bluestone or large-format pavers, the kind that were drawn on the original plans and never built.
Retaining walls. The city’s wall height threshold isn’t published; we plan on the four-foot rule every neighboring city uses and confirm with Community Development (770-451-8745). Retaining Walls
Drainage. Crooked Creek runs through the city on its way to the Chattahoochee. French drains, underground downspout runs, catch basins and regrading for the flat clay lots that hold water. Drainage and French Drains
Planting. Natives and tough adapted plants: oakleaf hydrangea, beautyberry, little bluestem, muhly grass, coneflower, and evergreen structure with Nellie Stevens holly and tea olive where privacy from Buford Highway traffic matters.
Quiet electric lawn care. Weekly and bi-weekly service, fertilization, weed control and pest control with an organic option for each.
Commercial grounds. The Assembly redevelopment on the old GM plant site, the businesses along Buford Highway and Peachtree Industrial, church campuses, and multifamily common areas. Commercial Maintenance
Doraville yards, specifically
Historic district. Northwoods homeowners aren’t bound by a design review for landscaping, but the houses look best with hardscape that respects the lines: rectangles, long steps, gravel and stone rather than curves.
Permits. Fences need a permit (8 feet max side and rear, 4 feet and see-through in front). Trees three inches and up that mature above fifteen feet need a permit to remove, and pruning limbs on trunks over eight inches does too. Land disturbance and right-of-way work are separate permits. Everything goes through CloudPermit with the notarized affidavit.
Flat clay. Doraville lots don’t slope much, so water sits. Getting downspouts underground and out to the street or a dry well solves most of it.
Two languages. More than half of Doraville residents speak a first language other than English; our crew speaks Spanish and English on every job.
How a Doraville project actually runs
The site visit is free and it is a conversation, not a pitch. We walk the yard, look at where water goes in a storm, measure what needs measuring and tell you what we think the property needs first. You get a written scope afterwards with the work broken into parts, so you can see what to do now and what can wait a year.
Then the paperwork, which in Doraville takes longer than most people plan for. Reviews run about ten business days, and nothing can be submitted at all until the owner affidavit has been notarised, which is a trip you have to make yourself. So if the project needs a land disturbance permit or a tree permit, put two extra weeks on the calendar before a machine turns up. We do the filing. What we cannot do is make the review go faster, and a contractor who promises to start next week on a job that needs a permit is either skipping it or guessing.
On site we work in an order that does not need undoing. Water first, because nothing built on a wet base survives. Then the shape of the ground, terraces and steps and walls. Then the hard surfaces, patio and path. Then planting. Lighting last, because it should follow the finished garden rather than lead it. On a Northwoods or Oakcliff lot, where the houses sit low and the ground is flatter than in Dunwoody, that usually means more drainage work and less wall work than a client expects.
What it is like having our crew in your yard
Everything we run is battery powered and charges from a solar trailer. There is no generator idling on your driveway for a week, no fuel cans by the fence, and no two-stroke exhaust drifting into the house while somebody is working from home twenty feet away. On a street of mid-century ranches where the lots sit close together, that is not a small thing.
We will not tell you it is silent. A plate compactor and a masonry saw are loud, and there is no quiet version of either. What disappears is the constant engine drone in between, which is the part people actually complain about, and it is why we get asked back onto streets where a neighbour has watched the whole job.
New planting comes with instructions rather than hope. Under the Georgia Water Stewardship Act outdoor watering runs 4 p.m. to 10 a.m., with new plantings exempt for their first thirty days and drip lines and hand-watering with a shutoff nozzle exempt any time. Where it makes sense we put beds on drip, which keeps them legal to water and cuts the amount they need once they are established. And we leave the site clean at the end of every day, not just at the end of the job.
Questions Doraville homeowners ask us
Do I need a permit for a patio in Doraville? Usually not for a ground-level patio that sits on grade and holds back no soil. It changes once there is a roof over it, a seat wall tall enough to count as a retaining wall, or an electrical run for lighting. We check with the city before the first shovel goes in rather than after.
How tall can a retaining wall be before it needs a permit? The city doesn’t publish a number. We assume four feet, like every city around it, and confirm with Community Development before we quote.
Can you remove the old concrete slab? Yes, and demolition and haul-off are written into the quote rather than added later. Where we can, the broken concrete and the old base stone get crushed and reused as base on the same job, and what is left goes to a recycler instead of a landfill. If the slab runs out to the street, note that the section in the right of way is a separate Doraville approval, so it gets sorted before anyone starts breaking anything.
Can you remove a tree in Doraville? Anything three inches and up that grows above fifteen feet needs a city permit. We handle the application.
Is the equipment really all electric, right down to the saws? Yes, including the compactors and saws. The solar panels on the trailer recharge the batteries between jobs.
Do you serve all of Doraville? Yes: Northwoods, Oakcliff, Tilly Mill, Gordon Hills, Gordon Heights, the Assembly area and the Buford Highway corridor.
Nearby
We are about ten minutes away in Dunwoody and work the same short radius: Chamblee next door, then Brookhaven, Sandy Springs and Peachtree Corners. Service pages, if that is what you came for: drainage, French drains and grading, eco-friendly lawn care, fertilization, weed and pest control.
On the Northwoods and Oakcliff ranches the front approach is usually the first thing that dates a house: a narrow walk, a step or two that have drifted out of level, and an apron at the street that has taken sixty years of turning wheels. Because the apron sits in the right of way, that end of the job is a separate approval here. The detail is on our steps, walkways and driveways page.
Book a site visit
(404) 369-0989 · info@oakavelandscape.com · book a free site visit