Outdoors

Outside is where this county is hardest on a house. The sun takes the coating off a south wall years before the north one, the water bill is mostly the yard, and the pipe that fails most expensively is the one nobody can see. This page is everything from the front door outward.

Sewer and water line work sits here as well as under plumbing, because a sewer line is a trench across your yard before it is anything else. Same page, same quote, either way.

Three numbers that decide outdoor work here

101.9°F. The normal daily high in St. George in July, on NOAA’s 1991 to 2020 record for the city’s own station, with August at 99.9°F. Benjamin Moore caps application of its exterior coating at a surface temperature of 100°F and PPG at 100°F ambient. An average July afternoon here is at the edge of what the manufacturers publish, before you measure the wall, which in sun is hotter than the air. It is why exterior work follows the shade around a house instead of the schedule.

$3 a square foot. What the Washington County Water Conservancy District pays on the first 1,000 square feet of lawn removed, and $2 a square foot after that, capped at $100,000 per property per calendar year. The yard is most of a water bill here and the district will help pay to change it. We handle that paperwork rather than handing you a form.

The most troublesome condition the state maps. That is the Utah Geological Survey’s own phrase for expansive soil and rock — clay that swells when wet and shrinks when dry — and it illustrates the hazard with cracks in a Santa Clara house foundation. Collapsible soil does the opposite and settles when it gets wet. Both mean the same thing outdoors: water in the wrong place, from an irrigation line or a downspout or a failed sewer lateral, is a foundation question and not just a water-bill question.

Every figure above is somebody else’s published number, and the pages below that rest on one cite it.