We’re the landscaping company that lives here
Oak Avenue is based in Dunwoody. Our trailer charges off the sun in a driveway a few minutes from Dunwoody Village, and most of the yards we’ve built patios, walls and drainage in over the last three years are between Mt. Vernon Road and the Chamblee-Dunwoody corridor. We know which streets flood in a September storm, which subdivisions have the steep back lots, and what the city will and won’t let you do near a creek.
We’re also the company the City of Dunwoody picked for its 2023 Sustainability Hero Award. Everything we run is electric and charged by solar panels on the trailer. On a hardscape job that means no gas engine on your property for two weeks, and on a maintenance route it means your neighbors don’t hear us.
Call (404) 369-0989 or book a free site visit. We’ll walk the yard with you and give you a written number.
What we build in Dunwoody
Paver and stone patios. Belgard and Techo-Bloc pavers, Pennsylvania bluestone, Crab Orchard flagstone. The city generally doesn’t require a permit for a patio that stays under 24 inches and doesn’t push your street-facing yard past 35% hard surface (gravel counts). Paver Patios in Dunwoody
Retaining walls. Dunwoody Club Forest, Hidden Branches and Withmere lots were cut into hillsides in the 1970s and a lot of the original timber walls are at the end of their lives. We build modular block, natural boulder and poured-concrete walls. Walls over four feet generally need a permit and an engineer’s drawing; we handle the paperwork with Community Development. Retaining Walls in Dunwoody
Drainage and French drains. Perimeter Creek starts in Dunwoody and half the neighborhoods in the city drain toward Nancy Creek. If your crawlspace is damp or the side yard stays soft for three days after rain, it’s almost always red clay that won’t absorb water plus a downspout dumping next to the foundation. French drains, underground downspout extensions, catch basins, dry creek beds and regrading. Drainage and French Drains
Grading and slope repair. Erosion control, terracing, Dirt Locker installs on slopes too steep to plant, and the base work under any patio or wall so it’s still level in ten years.
Planting and native gardens. We’ve put in more than 900 native plants around the city: oakleaf hydrangea, pink muhly, little bluestem, Piedmont azalea, black-eyed Susan, plants that shrug off August and feed the pollinators Dunwoody’s Sustainability Committee keeps pushing for.
Quiet electric maintenance. Weekly and bi-weekly mowing, edging, blowing and bed care, all electric, plus fertilization, weed control and pest control with an organic option for each. Dunwoody’s noise ordinance stops contractors from running blowers before 7:30 on weekdays and at all on Sundays; ours are quiet enough that the rule stops mattering. Residential Maintenance
Commercial grounds. Office parks and medical buildings around Perimeter Center, churches and schools along Mt. Vernon and Ashford-Dunwoody, HOA entrances and pool areas. Mowing during business hours without a tenant complaint is something a gas crew can’t offer. Commercial Maintenance
Dunwoody yards, specifically
Red clay. The whole city sits on Cecil-series soil: a few inches of topsoil over kaolinite clay that holds water when it’s wet and turns to brick when it’s dry. It’s why sod fails, why plants drown in winter and die of thirst in July, and why we amend every bed with soil conditioner and build every patio on a compacted graded base rather than on the clay itself.
Slopes and creeks. Dunwoody’s older subdivisions were graded for houses, not yards. Back lots drop off, and the 75-foot stream buffer along Nancy Creek’s tributaries limits what can be built near the water. We’ve done a lot of terracing and a lot of walls in Dunwoody Club Forest, Village Mill, Brooke Farm and the streets off Tilly Mill.
Hard surface limits. The city caps street-facing yards at 35% impervious coverage, and gravel counts. That shapes front-yard patios, parking pads and driveway extensions, and it’s why permeable pavers are sometimes the only way to get what you want approved.
Trees. Anything in the stream buffer needs the city arborist’s sign-off (678-382-6820), and larger trees need a permit. We plan around the canopy rather than through it.
What Dunwoody clients say
“The equipment is incredibly quiet. I was still in bed when he started around 8:30 AM, and I didn’t hear any disruptive noise. It wasn’t until he called me to check the progress that I even realized work had begun.” – Kristen M., Dunwoody (Google)
“Lloyd’s expertise is unmatched. He identified affordable and effective solutions for our water drainage issues. We’re so grateful to Lloyd and his team for their fast and efficient project execution.” – Deena M. (Google)
“Highly recommended. Great communication, from initial call to estimate, to execution of work, including clean up. Excellent recommendations on work to be performed, and fair pricing. I will be using them again for additional work next spring. High quality work.” – Jessica L.
The hours a crew is allowed to work here, and why ours barely matter
Dunwoody’s noise ordinance draws a line most residents have never read but every neighbour feels. Landscaping contractors may not run mowers or blowers on a weekday before 7:30 in the morning or after 8:30 at night, on a Saturday before 8 or after 8:30, and not at all on Sundays or public holidays. Homeowners doing their own yards are exempt, which is why the guy across the street can edge his driveway on a Sunday afternoon and we cannot.
Battery equipment does not buy an exemption, and we do not ask for one. Georgia law actually stops a city from treating a battery blower differently from a gas one, so the rules are the same for every crew on the street. We keep to them. What changes is not when we are allowed to work but what your neighbour hears while we do.
The practical difference. A gas mower and blower running at 7:35 on a Tuesday will wake a bedroom on the other side of a property line. Ours are quiet enough that most clients find out we came because the yard is done, not because they heard us. One of our Dunwoody reviews says exactly that, and it is the single most common thing people tell us after the first visit.
The honest exception. Some machines are loud whatever powers them. A plate compactor bedding a patio, a masonry saw cutting wall block, a stump grinder: those are genuinely noisy, and there is no battery version of that problem. What we do is stack the loud work into the middle of the day rather than the start of it, and tell you which day it lands on so you can warn the neighbour before we do it instead of after.
Everything downstream starts in a Dunwoody yard
Dunwoody sits at the top of its watershed. Perimeter Creek begins inside the city and the tributaries running through Brook Run Park head off toward Nancy Creek and eventually the Chattahoochee. Being first in line sounds like an advantage, and for flooding it mostly is. For water quality it is the opposite: what leaves your yard is the first thing in the creek, and there is nothing upstream to dilute it.
The city is already spending money on this. The Brook Run tributaries carry more bacteria and sediment than they should, mostly from banks that have been cut away by fast water over the years, and the city has been pursuing state funding to rebuild roughly 850 feet of streambank near the multi-use fields. Sediment in a creek is topsoil that used to be in somebody’s yard, which is a useful way to think about a bare slope out back.
What that changes about a yard plan. The instinct with standing water is to pipe it to the street as fast as possible. That solves your problem by handing it to the creek at speed, which is how banks end up undercut. We would rather slow it down and let the ground take some of it: a dry creek bed that holds water for an hour instead of a minute, a rain garden in the low corner planted with things that do not mind wet feet, downspouts carried away from the foundation and released where they can soak instead of scour, and permeable surfaces where a solid one is not doing any real work.
It is also the cheapest kind of drainage. Slowing water down usually means grading and planting rather than pipe and stone, and it does not need a permit the way a large land-disturbing fix does. When a yard genuinely needs pipe, we say so. Quite often it needs shape more than it needs hardware.
The permits people forget until the inspection
Decks always need one. There is no size below which a deck is exempt in Dunwoody, and a deck attached to a patio project is the single most common thing that turns a two-week job into a five-week one because nobody applied at the start.
Land disturbance comes with a bond. Grading, grubbing, tree removal, driveway work and stormwater work all fall under a land disturbance permit, and the city requires an erosion control bond alongside it. That is a real line on a project budget and we would rather it be in the estimate than a surprise in week three.
Gravel drives have rules of their own. Gravel counts as hard surface in Dunwoody, and a gravel driveway also needs a durable border to keep the stone where it belongs plus a concrete apron where it meets the street. A gravel drive laid without either will spread, wash into the gutter and eventually get a letter from the city.
None of this is meant to be discouraging. Dunwoody’s permit staff are straightforward to deal with and most residential applications move quickly. The projects that go badly are the ones where nobody asked until a neighbour did.
Questions Dunwoody homeowners ask us
Do I need a permit for a retaining wall in Dunwoody? The city lists a fence and wall application but doesn’t publish a height threshold. Every surrounding city uses four feet, and that’s the safe assumption: over four feet, expect to need a permit and an engineered drawing. We confirm with Community Development (678-382-6821) before we quote a tall wall.
Is electric equipment strong enough for grading and hardscape? Yes. Our excavation, compaction and cutting tools are commercial battery equipment, and the trailer recharges everything from solar between jobs. What you notice on site is the quiet and the absence of exhaust.
When can you work in my neighborhood? Dunwoody allows contractor landscaping weekdays 7:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. and Saturdays from 8 a.m.; not Sundays or holidays. We schedule inside those hours and, because the equipment is quiet, we don’t get the early-morning complaints.
Can you fix a soggy back yard without tearing it up? Usually. Underground downspout extensions and a single French drain solve most of the standing-water problems we see in Dunwoody. Regrading is the answer when the yard slopes toward the house.
Do you work with HOAs? Yes. We maintain HOA common areas and we’re used to the approval process for walls, fences and hardscape in neighborhoods with architectural review.
How far from Dunwoody do you go? Sandy Springs, Brookhaven, Chamblee, Doraville, Peachtree Corners, Norcross and the Perimeter area. About fifteen miles.
Nearby
This one is home. The trailer parks here and the panels charge here. The same crew works Sandy Springs, Brookhaven, Chamblee, Doraville and Peachtree Corners, plus the office and medical properties around Perimeter Center. Single services in full: drainage, French drains and grading, eco-friendly lawn care, fertilization, weed and pest control.
Two of these have a Dunwoody page of their own: backyard makeovers, and yard drainage and grading, which covers the land disturbance permit, the 35 percent impervious cap on a street-facing yard, and where water is actually allowed to end up.
Driveways come up here more than anywhere else we work, because the hard surface limit on a street facing yard turns a simple replacement into an arithmetic problem. If the job is a front walk, a set of steps or a drive rather than a whole yard, the detail sits on our steps, walkways and driveways page.
Book a site visit
Call (404) 369-0989, email info@oakavelandscape.com, or book a free site visit. We’ll be there when we say we will, and the quote is in writing.