ValleyRidge 001 Customer Testimonial
Video Transcript
Hello, my name is Stan Rhymer. I'm a retired engineer living in North West Calgary. And two years ago, we hired the landscape artists to design uh a renovation for our yard and to carry out the work. And we are very happy with the results.
We wanted fire tables. We wanted new decks. We wanted a yard that was low maintenance and so that we could travel because we like to travel in retirement and there would be very little to take care of while we were gone.
Prior to the redesign, the front yard was a mess. We had a large evergreen tree removed recently. There was still a hole in the front yard where that was located. And the backyard, we had two choke cherry trees and uh it's a relatively small backyard. The cherry trees took up a lot of room. We wanted to redesign the yard so that it was functional for us to relax in our retirement. And so we have this fire pit outside, natural gas. And we also wanted new decks front and back. And we really like the sun room here that resulted.
The sun room actually added a lot to our house. It's about the same size as our living room, about 18 ft x 14 ft. And so we have a fire table in there. We have chairs. We have gemstone lights all the way around the top. We've got an Amazon Echo in for sound and it is just really relaxing sitting down in the evening or in the morning with a cup of coffee looking out at the backyard and enjoying our neighborhood.
It's really a three season room. It has a louvered roof so we can open it up for more air and it's an automatic louvered roof. We spend a lot of time in our sun room. We've recently had our home renovated, but the sun room has become our favorite place to hang out. We never spent a lot of time in our backyard before we had the renovations done.
We are really happy with the artificial grass, particularly with the latest water restrictions in Calgary. So the artificial grass, it's the greenest lawn in our neighborhood. It's really maintenance free and we like to travel as I said earlier and so it's really nice to not have to worry about cutting grass.
The granular that we have around the house is uh pretty much maintenance-free. All we have to do is water plants once a week in the summer.
Yeah, we had a number of choices and we like the composite decking because once again it's maintenance free, doesn't need staining, it's easy to clean, it looks good for many years and we are absolutely happy with the composite decking.
When we first asked Clayton Ditzler to design a renovation for our yard, we didn't think that there he had a lot to work with here. It's a fairly small lot. The backyard is sloped um towards the fence at the back and uh but uh we're pretty surprised with the results. This particular patio here, rounded edges, very pleasing to look at. The same as the artificial grass, rounded, and so he was able to level out the backyard to a large extent with a retaining wall drop to the gutter that's running along our fence.
The neighbors we've shown our yards to, they can see the yard in the front, the one in the back is a little more hidden. They all really like the change and we've had a lot of positive feedback on the artificial turf. Because in winter here it can get quite dry and with water restrictions uh we've got the greenest lawn in the neighborhood. It's really easy to take care of. The neighbors were impressed because I mean I counted we had like two or three machines here at the peak with um almost a dozen people running around and uh but the one comment we did get on neighbors was that at the end of the day when they were finished working for the day the road in front of our place which was used to stockpile granular and top soil was all cleaned up in late afternoon so in the evening the road was all clear and and uh didn't offend the neighbors.
The reason that we hired the landscape artist to carry out uh the work on our property is because our neighbors three doors down had the landscape artist do their yard. And they the name I got wasn't landscape artist actually. It was Clayton Ditzler. You got to call this guy. And so we're quite happy we did.
