hi inkognito and dave, thanks for your help. i am working with a lanscaper - but as your know - i need to be informed myself for the best results. i am waitning for the landscaper to put together skecthches/pricing. i sounds as if i should go with a wood deck and suck it up and maintain it with sealer every year! my pool has a trex deck - it may be the less expensive trex - but its ugly and i would not put it on my house. i'll look up issues with mold..... ps - my dad said the same as you - that a raised patio will be a fortune if it is done correctly... i'll check back with you when i have nore info.... thanks again, nancy

Thanks for your reply , greenhouser2. My raised are watered till the water can be seen dripping below. I want the shade structure so that I can hybridize with my daylilies. Daylilies will not set seed if temperature is above 80 degrees. Every day since May we have had temperatures in the low to mid 90's. With water restrictions I can only water one day a week either before 6 am or after 7pm Therefore even with all the water I could give them , the sun has done a number on the foliage drying it out till it just crumbles when I touch it. I lost a lot of plants in the late Feb freeze we had and I am trying to get the survivors some protection so I can at least attempt to pollinate and produce seeds this coming spring.

Wow, much to think about. The pictures you sent looked a lot better than grass on the slop with a landscaped bed. This approach would really soften up my house much better. Low maintenance is a high priority for me. So I think trying to get away from shrubs is a good plan. I'm just not familiar with plantings at all. I'm still a bit hung up on figuring out what the height of the step down off the porch should be. Now that I understand your yellow/blue lines, it appears from your sketch the dirt line would be every bit of a 24" dropoff with ground cover around 18". This also looks similar to the photos you sent. I was worried this would be too much but assuming you agree with those dimensions, I'm going with it. The picture below gives a bigger picture. Note the patio section we've been discussing is on the right, it's way off to the side of the house (actually the carriage house/inlawsuite that was my grandmother's "retirement home" for 10 years until she passed away. (Don't be confused by the identical section in the middle labeled as Future: Phase 2, I was going to try out this concept on the side of the house with lower grade before attempting it in the middle section.) Here's an image looking out with the red circle on the left showing the area we're discussing. The panorama distorts the middle of the house making it appear as the center of the breeezeway. Because this is off to the side of the carriage house, it's really removed so I wasn't overly concerned about plantings, however, low maintenance is much better. Could you tell me what the purple and pink ground cover are. I'm not the most creative and would like to try to just copy what's in the photo if it works in 7b.

If you extend the deck and it's built correctly you shouldn't have settling. That's because the deck post footers should be dug down to undisturbed soil. On a new home, that may likely mean digging down to the house footer, which if you have a full basement is a big honkin' hole. Anything less is asking for trouble. You'll have a similar issue with a raised patio, since it's a new home. Because of the way they build foundations, you have a zone of disturbed soil all around your house, 5-10 feet out. This WILL continue to settle for up to a decade (depending on your local soil). In 20+ years doing this I have come across exactly one (1) builder who compacts his backfill properly. Everyone else chucks it in the hole, runs the machine back and forth a couple times, and calls it good. So to build a raised patio we would do one of two things: 1) excavate for the full patio all the way down to disturbed soil and build back up again with gravel, and then the patio. Or 2) if you're doing a concrete patio (or stone laid over concrete) we can dig for piers or wing walls to support the patio, which is way less excavation, labor, and spoils. Anything else will settle. It's why we don't build patios next to new homes. If you do your third option, I'd be prepared to re-lay the patio at least once more after that. If you're already having settling issues the base isn't appropriate for the conditions. As for gas line location, assume it's the shortest distance between two points.