Hardscaping in Fontana, WI

Hardscaping in Fontana, WI.

Hardscaping for Fontana at the west end of the lake - resort-era housing stock, mixed ground, and a lot of existing work now old enough to be moving.

Fontana carries an unusual mix of housing for a village this size: houses from the resort era, decades of infill between them, and a fair few rebuilt down to the footprint they started on. The hardscape follows the same pattern, which means much of the work here is not building new terraces but deciding what to do with old ones.

A great deal of it was built well, in materials better than what is easily bought today, on bases that were adequate for the expectations of the time. Where the stone is good and the movement is local, lifting and relaying the original material over a properly rebuilt base gives a result that matches the house immediately - something new stone cannot do for a decade.

Where it was not built well, the failure is almost always drainage rather than surface. Water that has nowhere to go collects, freezes, expands and lifts, and it does that every winter until something is done about the water. Resetting the stone without correcting that returns the terrace to the same condition in a few seasons.

For parcels inside the shoreland zone - anything within 1,000 feet of the water for land disturbance purposes, which is much of the village - a county permit sits alongside the town one, and the shore-yard rules fix where a wall or terrace may sit before any drawing does. Establishing which applies to a specific address is worth doing before a design is finished rather than after.