Lamenting the need to get rid of a good looking plant doesn't equal a suggestion to keep it. The Ficus could be hard-trimmed ruthlessly, but a human would resent that a plant had turned them into a slave ... when it's supposed to be the other way around. I agree with catkim that a different tree would be a better choice, all things considered. "I assume that a walkway the visually greets guests from the sidewalk would appear more welcoming than one that leads from the driveway... Do you think that I'm incorrect in this assumption?" edit: Oops ... I meant, in a word YES! (to the question about the assumption.) You should create a walk that looks like it makes the best sense for the overall property ... and a walk directly to the city sidewalk is not necessarily more welcoming. You might not want to duplicate what exists a mere few feet away. Much of it depends on the geometry of how a walk would be laid out, it's width, materials and/or finishes. I'm not saying a separate walk directly to the city walk would look bad, but that it might not be an improvement over one that ties to the drive. It depends on all the factors involved. You might explore similar houses in the neighborhood to see if others have come up with successful variations. This post was edited by Yardvaark on Sun, Oct 27, 13 at 12:25

The problem with the Los Angeles plant is that it wasn't in perfect healthy going into winter. It didn't have many leaves to start with. If the experiment fails..you will still wonder if a healthy plant would survive since we have had a extremely mild winter for lows so far. El Nino has bumped up night temps.

I'm curious if the previous commenters have built fiberglass pergolas. We've used several manufacturers for fiberglass pergolas. They're painted at the factory (typically offering Sherwin Williams or Benjamin Moore colors) and, like any other painted surface, will need occasional love. I've never seen fiberglass offered *not* painted. Patricia, can you please explain to me how a painted material turns yellow in the sun? Fiberglass has some great properties for a pergola application. You can get clear spans (distance between posts) that you can't get from wood. Also because all the members are hollow, it's easy to hide wiring for lights and speakers. Being that you're in SoCal I'd look into how fiberglass pergolas work with your seismic requirements. Typically the way a fiberglass pergola is built is there's a threaded rod that is anchored to the footer and extends through the post, The beam slides over the rod, and a nut is tightened down, holding everything very solidly via compression. As I'm not an engineer, I don't know if that's good or bad with regard to earthquakes, but I worry that it's so rigid you'd have a failure point. You may also consider a composite pergola. There's a company here in VA that builds pergolas that are hollow aluminum beams clad with composite lumber. You can also get nice long spans with these, and you can also use the hollow cores as wire chases. This is them, super nice folks: https://www.structureworksfab.com/ They also offer fiberglass so they'd be a good resource for the pros and cons of each.

@V M sorry, just seeing your post above. We are just now finally breaking ground on our home so I don't have pics of the flooring to show you from my house. I will come back and post when I do but that will be some months from now. But we are paying, I think, 15K for our Multi-Length Rigid Core SPC floors in color Sandhill. Our house will be 2975 sf and this floor covering will be throughout the home, except in 3 of the full baths and the utility room. I'm not exactly sure how many square feet that leaves but hopefully you can do some rough math. Everything goes through my builder so I don't have an exact price per square foot to provide you. I also am not sure if this includes labor to install.