The back yard is yours to finish
Betenbough hands over a Lone Star Trails home with the front yard complete: sod down, sprinkler system installed, curb appeal sorted. The back is graded caliche and nothing else.
For most families in this community, the back yard is the part of the house that matters most day to day, and it is the part that arrives unfinished. There is no patio slab, no fence, no surface. That is the gap we fill.
Start with the patio, not the grass
The instinct is to think about grass first. In Lone Star Trails we usually advise the opposite.
Without a patio there is nowhere to actually be in the yard. A stamped or stained concrete area off the back door changes the space from something you look at into something you use, and it changes it immediately. Turf and rock then work around it.
There is also a practical reason for this order. Concrete work needs machine access, mixing space and somewhere to move material. Doing it after the turf is down means either damaging finished work or paying to protect it. Concrete first, then everything else, is both cheaper and cleaner.
Turf and rock around the patio
Once the patio position is set, the rest follows naturally. Turf where children and dogs will be. Decorative rock along the fence line and in the corners. Borders and edging to keep the two apart cleanly, which is the detail that separates a finished yard from a yard with grass in it.
Lone Star Trails lots are city sized rather than county sized, which means most of the yard is usable and the whole area is visible from the house. That argues for finishing all of it rather than leaving the far end bare, and it is why full backyard packages are the most common project we complete in this community.
Ground preparation in Midland 79705
Caliche runs close to the surface across this part of Midland. On a newly graded lot it is compacted hard by machine traffic during construction, which makes excavation heavier work than it looks and makes drainage worse than it looks.
We excavate to the depth the installation requires, correct the fall so water runs away from the foundation, and build a compacted base before anything visible goes down. On a new build in this community that base work is usually the largest single part of the job, and it is what everything else depends on.
