When a garden renovation goes over budget, the cause is rarely a single expensive item. It is almost always rework — something built, then taken apart again because a later stage needed the ground it was standing on. And that is entirely avoidable, because the correct order of work in a garden is well understood and does not change much from site to site.
It starts with access, before any design conversation. How material gets in and spoil gets out determines the method for everything that follows, and on the hillside lots around Mill Valley, Fairfax, and San Rafael it frequently determines the price too. A job a machine can reach and a job where every wheelbarrow goes up forty steps are not the same job, and pretending otherwise at quoting stage helps nobody.
Demolition and clearance come next. Old concrete, failed decks, leaning fences, and overgrown planting all come out first, along with the buried surprises that turn up underneath them — old footings, forgotten irrigation, tree roots, and construction debris left by whoever built the house. Finding those at the start is inconvenient. Finding them after the new patio is poured is expensive.
Then grading and drainage, which is the least visible and most important stage of the whole build. Where water goes in a wet winter has to be decided before any surface is fixed in place, because a slab or a lawn set at the wrong level will send water at the house for as long as it exists. Falls, drains, and any retaining that holds a slope all get resolved here, while the ground is still open and cheap to work.
Irrigation follows, and this is the one most commonly done out of order. Mainline and valves have to be in before hardscape goes over the top of them, because a line that needs to cross a finished patio later means either cutting the patio or running the pipe somewhere it should not go. Sleeves under any paved area cost almost nothing at this stage and are close to impossible to add afterwards.
Now hardscape — footings, walls, steps, concrete, decks, and fences. This is the heavy work, the machinery, and the material deliveries, and it makes a mess of everything around it. Which is precisely why it comes before planting rather than after: nobody wants a wheelbarrow run through a new bed, and nobody wants to pay twice for plants that were installed too early and crushed.
Planting comes second to last, into ground that is finally at its final level, with drip run to each plant as it goes in rather than added later. And lawn or turf goes last of all, because it is the surface least able to survive being worked over. Laying sod and then walking material across it for a week is a good way to buy a lawn twice.
There is one honest exception to all this: phasing. Plenty of gardens get built over two or three years as budget allows, and that is a perfectly sensible way to do it. But phasing works only if the whole plan exists up front, so that the sleeves, conduits, and levels a later phase will need are put in during an earlier one. Phasing to a plan is thrift. Phasing without one is just paying for the same ground twice.
M&L Rodas Landscape handles the whole sequence in-house — demolition, groundwork, irrigation, hardscape, planting, and lawns — across Marin, Sonoma, and Napa counties. Call (415) 717-9584 to walk your site and get the stages priced in the right order.