You start further ahead here than most
If you have moved into Northwest Passage from a Betenbough community, the back yard situation is noticeably better. D.R. Horton includes a fully fenced back yard and a covered patio as standard, and the front yard arrives with a low maintenance design and an irrigation system already installed.
What you do not get is anything on the ground behind that patio. It is bare, graded and enclosed, waiting for a decision.
That is a good starting position. The fence is in, so there is no machine traffic still to come across the yard. The covered patio gives a fixed point to design around and a hard edge to build from. In practice it means Northwest Passage projects are cleaner and faster than the equivalent job in a community where the fence has not gone in yet.
Designing outward from the covered patio
The covered patio is the anchor. Almost every good Northwest Passage back yard we have built extends from it in one of three ways.
Extend the concrete. A stamped or stained concrete extension off the covered slab gives you an uncovered sun area, room for a table and grill, and a much larger usable surface. Matching or deliberately contrasting the existing slab both work, and this is the single most requested addition in this community.
Turf directly off the patio edge. Clean transition, no step down, and a surface that stays usable through the summer. This is what families with children and dogs choose almost every time.
Rock the perimeter, turf the middle. Decorative rock along the fence line and in the corners, turf in the center where it is used. Costs less than turfing the whole area and looks more considered.
Floor plans and yard sizes here
Northwest Passage floor plans start at around 1,681 square feet and run to two story homes with up to five bedrooms. Larger footprint means smaller back yard on a comparable lot, and in this community the back yards are moderate rather than large.
That is an argument for finishing all of it. In a small, fully enclosed and fully visible yard, an unfinished section is visible from every window at the back of the house. The yards here are the right size to complete in one project.
Ground conditions
The same caliche applies, and construction traffic in a new phase compacts it hard. The fence being already installed does not change the excavation requirement, and it does slightly limit machine access, which we plan for rather than discover on the day.
Front yard irrigation is already installed by the builder here. We locate and protect existing lines before excavating anywhere near them, because repairing a cut line is an avoidable cost.
