The Hillside Network

After forty-five years on the La Habra Heights hillside, you build a quiet network. A handful of people I have watched do honest work on hard properties — and a handful of professionals who solve the kinds of problems hillside owners do not expect to have until they are sitting in them.

This page is not a phone book. There are no names below, no numbers, no links to anyone’s website.

What this page does do is name the kinds of help that exist up here. Most owners in La Habra Heights do not know half of these doors are open, or what they cost when a neighbor opens them instead of a stranger.

You knew May 1 was coming. You had the weed eater out and your son-in-law over for the weekend. You went through the City’s brochure picture by picture — dead shrubbery, castor bean, tumbleweeds green and dead, discarded limbs and refuse, chaparral, arundo. You even caught the California tobacco plant before it took the slope.

Then the inspection notice arrives with a photograph of your queen palm on it.

Dead palm fronds are on the same list. You never looked up, and neither did your brush crew — they do not carry climbing gear, and a palm is not something you send a man up without it. Besides, you had it done. Three years ago. Four, maybe.

Now it is May, every tree service on this hill is booked by every other property that got the same notice, and the quote is a thousand dollars. Twelve hundred. For one palm. And you have seven days to send the inspector proof it is done.

If nobody answers the notice — you are on a cruise, you are with a parent in the hospital, you simply missed it — the City can clear the property itself. The brochure is blunt about it: the City has the authority to abate without prior notice and/or approval of the property owner. That is a crew of five or ten men on your land, working to their standard and not yours. And the bill is not the couple of hundred you handed your son-in-law.

I do not take that work and I make nothing from it. But I know a licensed tree company that will do a queen palm properly for three to four hundred dollars, most any day of the year — a little more if two have grown together or it stands against a power line. They gave me their word on that price. The fair thing, if they hold to it, is to send them the rest of your tree work the other nine months of the year.

And if you already have someone who does palms in that range, tell me. I will go look at their work, and if it holds up they can bless a lot of neighbors up here.

I am not connected to any of these people. No contracts, no arrangements, no finder’s fee — I do not make a dollar when you hire one of them, and I would not know if you did.

I offer no warranty and no guarantee on their work, and I take no responsibility for it. The relationship is yours.

What I do is look first. I have interviewed nearly everyone on this list. Most of them I have filmed on an actual job — my property, or a neighbor’s — and photographed while they worked, before I ever considered passing the name along.

You have seen them at Costco, at Lowe’s, at Home Depot. Nine hundred dollars, sometimes less. And you have walked away from one at least twice.

It is never the price. It is the arithmetic that starts on the way home. The box is enormous. Even borrowing your son-in-law’s truck, how does it come off at the other end? Up the driveway. Around the house. Out to the far corner of the acre where you actually want it. And then what does it sit on?

Most people answer that last question by raking the dirt level and setting it down. That does not work, and I tested it so you would not have to. The doors stop closing within a season. The panels rack. Clay swells through the winter and lifts one corner, and the nine hundred dollars becomes a nine-hundred-dollar mistake leaning in the back yard.

Three days from unused slope to this. The shed was the last day of it.

Here is the order that works. A concrete finisher comes out and decides with you where the shed goes and how large the slab should be — the same footprint as the building, or a foot or two proud so you are not tracking mud through the door, or a small apron so a hand truck can reach it. He digs out the clay, brings in gravel and road base, forms it, and pours. Concrete delivered, or mixed on site with a helper, depending on what your driveway will take. Then it cures.

After that a handyman collects the shed for you, opens the box, carries the parts to where it is going, and assembles it. Seven by eight feet is one day’s work for somebody who has built one before.

Want to see the three days?Open the sequence →

One

Mixed on site rather than delivered. On a narrow hillside drive that is often the only way concrete arrives at all.

Two

The finished pour. Compacted road base underneath, steel through it, and a surface flat enough that the doors still close in ten years.

Three

Assembly begins with the floor, laid straight onto the cured slab.

Four

The first wall goes up. Everything after this is faster than it looks.

Five

Walls take shape. One man, one day, no special equipment.

Six

Structure closed, before the roof and doors go on. Then it is anchored to the slab against the wind.

The building can be a Lifetime from Costco, a Tuff Shed, a wood-framed shop, or something considerably larger. It changes almost nothing about the order of operations. The foundation is the investment that decides how well any of them performs over the long term — and it is the part nobody puts in the budget.

A real-estate attorney can carry a whole transaction in about ten hours — three to four thousand dollars, against a listing commission many times that on a hillside property.

Tell me what you need and roughly when. If I have someone, I will make the introduction. If I am still looking, I will say so rather than send you to a stranger.

Ask for a name Or pass one along →