Mark’s Rental House – sustainable BALLARD

Mark and his family live in Ballard, where they’d watched RainWise installations pop up all around them in the past few years. While other home-improvement priorities pushed RainWise lower on his To-Do list at home, Mark thought about what a great help RainWise would be for his rental house in Wallingford.

When the Fremont-Wallingford Rebate Basin opened up, Mark jumped on it. RainWise was the solution to two nagging problems there:

1) Each big rainfall brought potential FLOODING to the basement. The downspouts were all correctly directing water into the storm drains, but tree roots repeatedly blocked the storm sewer pipes, causing water to back up. Directing rainwater into a rain garden would keep it out of the tree-clogged storm sewer lines. Worries be gone!

2) The front yard had a small, not very useble patch of lawn, and yard care got intermittent attention over the years, either from tenants or from Mark and his wife. A rain garden would provide attractive, low-maintenance landscaping, while helping Puget Sound too!

Mark couldn’t be happier with the beautiful new rain garden. Both problems were resolved overnight!

Stewart4 — Mark’s tenants love the new yard too, and are busy building raised beds to grow vegetables in the wood-chipped area behind the rain garden.

StewartAfter — Finished! Mark asked his contractor to redo the planting strip at the same time, eliminating that patch of grass as well. Fasoldt Design built up some berms there, using soil that otherwise would have been trucked away.

As a landlord, Mark feels confident that the RainWise installation will help attract future tenants. “When you take care and make the place nicer, tenants have more stake to do the same. And everyone feels good about helping the environment,” said Mark.

Stewart6 — A challenge Mark’s property posed to the three contractors who bid on the job: How to direct the water from the right side of the roof around the driveway and into the rain garden. Fasoldt Design came up with the winning solution: pipe the water around the back of the house!

Rain Garden (installed December 2014)

Design and Installation by Fasoldt Gardens

Rebate: $4623

100% of total project cost (work on planting strip area was additional)