Patios & Hardscape in Golden, Colorado

Golden is the hardest ground we work

At 5,784 feet, Golden is the highest and geologically the meanest city on our list — and that's not a complaint, it's a design brief.

The city sits at the mountain front against the Golden Hogback: steeply dipping Cretaceous sedimentary bedrock, including Pierre Shale, at or near the surface. The Colorado Geological Survey has published specifically on this — heaving bedrock is worst exactly where beds dip steeply, because adjacent beds with different expansive character move differentially. One strip of ground swells, the strip six feet away doesn't, and anything rigid spanning the two of them cracks.

Then there's Clear Creek, filling the valley floor with cobble and gravel alluvium. Excellent drainage. Miserable digging. Boulders exactly where you wanted the bottom of the wall.

Then there's grade. Real grade, the kind that turns a patio into a patio plus a wall plus a set of steps.

What that means for how we build

Test holes, not assumptions. In Golden the ground can change materially within one property. We dig before we design.

Drainage is the entire game. Bedrock near the surface means water can't go down — it goes sideways, and it goes sideways toward the low thing, which is usually your house or your patio. Every job here gets its water routed deliberately: surface fall at roughly ¼ inch per foot, drain rock and daylighted pipe behind any wall, and a hard look at where the runoff from the slope above actually ends up.

Flexible pavement is friendlier here. Differential bedrock movement will crack a rigid slab. Pavers and dry-laid flagstone can absorb a little movement and — more to the point — can be lifted, corrected, and reset. Why Colorado patios heave covers the mechanism.

Walls and steps are usually part of the job. Hillside lots need retaining and seat walls and walkways and steps, and those come with drainage design, engineering, and permits.

Permits

Golden publishes its threshold from both directions, which we appreciate:

• Permit required: retaining and landscape walls over 4 feet tall — and engineering is required with it.
• No permit: walls 4 feet or under, not supporting a surcharge.

Note the word landscape. Golden's language isn't limited to structural retaining walls. And on a sloped Golden lot, a "surcharge" is easy to end up with — the slope above the wall is itself a load.

Frost depth: 36 inches below grade, per Golden Municipal Code Chapter 15.08.

Access and the historic core

Downtown Golden's older lots are tight, and getting a machine into a back yard is sometimes flatly impossible. On a hillside property, it's sometimes impossible in a different way. Either one means hand-hauling material, and either one means the price reflects days of labor rather than machine hours. We tell you which one you have at the estimate. What a patio costs in Colorado walks through why access moves the number as much as material does.

Get an estimate.