Situation
We were brought in to plan a multi-acre Hill Country estate. The previous contractor, eager to be seen doing something, had already begun installing irrigation — some three weeks in, before anyone had reviewed the grade, settled on a planting strategy, or so much as asked the land where its water went. Motion had been mistaken for progress, as it usually is.
Observation
We arrived to find roughly $14,000 of buried PVC threaded, with real conviction, straight through the only viable rain-garden site on the property. The mainline crossed beneath a planned aqueduct grade. The system worked flawlessly. It was perfectly capable of watering things — merely the wrong things, in the wrong places, with admirable efficiency.
What we learned
The previous contractor was not wrong about needing irrigation. He was wrong about order, which is the more expensive thing to be wrong about. Every landscape failure we have seen in five years opens with the same stage direction: build before read, plant before plan, pipe before grade. The remedy is almost never to do more. It is to do the same things in the order the land was already asking for — out loud, to anyone who paused to listen. Reading comes first, and a full Land Report of your property — grade, soil, and where the water goes — is what sets the order before a dollar gets buried in the wrong place.
Sequence is the most expensive variable on the property. Get it wrong and the budget multiplies.