Creative Outdoors: Elevating Curb Appeal and Outdoor Living Spaces

0:00Hey everybody, welcome back to Signal's news podcast. I'm Alicia. I am joined today with David DeBoard. You are the creative behind creative mentors. How long you've been doing? I started here in the early 90s and then we switched over to creative outdoors and I think was 2001 after I got married. So we teamed up and we formed creative outdoors. Awesome. So I'm looking at all the pretty pictures. You guys need to definitely go on the website. Tell us a little bit about what you do. So we are all phases of landscaping, whether you need a retaining wall or a garden wall or artificial turf, pavers. We do a lot of pavers. We've done about 8,000 driveways in the last 30 years. So we do a ton of driveways. All phases of landscaping, whether you need zero escape with almost no plants, desert plants, or if we're going to go with lush trees and shrubs, we do it all. You guys also do beautiful outdoor, it looks like kitchen

1:03areas, the barbecue areas. Our weather is always so great. We get to spend a lot of time outside, but what better way to take advantage of that space? More people live outside than they used to. The patios are getting bigger. There's more amenities outside. A lot of people are doing outdoor kitchens, luxury patios. We work with some of the other contractors and they put in shade structures, purgolas, things like that. Yeah, big old fireplaces and looks like some fountain type stuff. I just everything you can possibly think of. One thing I heard, you guys get a lot of awards. Yes, we've won one of the most awarded installers in the state of Arizona. There's also Shaw, which is a Southwest Heartscape Association, which is a three-state region. Last year, we picked up the number one, Heartscaper in Tucson for it's called Heroes of Heartscape, which is a bell guard line. We got number one in Heartscaping and then we got last year at Shaw. We got first place in

2:10driveways, paper driveways, and we got first and second retaining walls. We have an Oscars where we're patting ourselves on the back and talking about how good we are. Thank you. Why do you think you guys are winning all these awards? I think it's attention to detail. I've trained my two sons that are involved in this and they're very detail-oriented on it too, but I think I did a stint in the Navy. I was in submarines and it's always attention to detail and things have to be perfect and that's how we do it. We do every job to where we may submit that for an award. That's how we think about it. It could be something minor where we'd never would, but that's the way we do it. That's the quality that we put in our projects. Awesome. What is one of the biggest or coolest jobs you've ever done? We've, there's been so many. As far as driveways, there's a big monster that we just finished about a year ago upon Rainmaker and Williamson Valley. We moved four or five hundred tons of material out and boulders and we removed a little rock outcropping in front of his house,

3:14put in a motor court with a long driveway that goes back, custom pavers for that. We've done so many cool ones, and then we did one down in Paradise Valley. It's the highest lot in the state in Paradise Valley, and at that time it was the biggest home in the state. We did a really nice high end paper by Bill Gard and it's a windy switchbacks with these circle patterns. You rake your way on up to the top of this mountain, and we have one out here at the Preserve and Excription Canyon, which is as far as my knowledge, it's the most awarded home in the Southwest region. We've won first place in four different brackets for driveways, retaining walls, or pool patios, different brackets. Definitely if you want something a little different or something just super special, you guys are the ones to call for that. I met with a, we're looking at a county job right now, and he's already taken three other contractors look at him. They said they can't do it. There's no way they could figure it out. I'm like, we'll do it. He's getting the higher ups to look at it and see if we're

4:17going to be able to do what I want to do, but he's like, you're the first one we spoke to that came at this and said, yeah, it's doable. That wasn't that. No, we're good. We're good. It shows here. I was looking at the website. You guys do artificial turf, which is big, because being from another state, we had grass all the time. That's how I do miss grass, but is this a place where you could get grass going or is it? Yeah, you can do, you know, you can do lawns. It's just they really push for the tax credits, get rid of the, you know, save water, save water. We're doing more and more turf than we used to. I think we have four, five. We're wrapping up right now in artificial turf. Some are very large. We did a charter school last year. The whole play area, it was, you know, it was turf. We have another playground coming up that's going to be turf, but water, I think is the big thing up here. Yeah, and turf though, it looks, it's they had some pretty realistic. It's getting more realistic than it used to be when we first started doing it. It was like indoor outdoor carpet. You know, it didn't, there was no effort made to make it look real. Roll it out. There you go. That's where the dog can go, but now it's getting far

5:20more realistic. So I'm taking a lot more pictures. It depends on where you grew up, what your opinion of grass is supposed to look like. So I went to California and that wasn't grass to me. What is this? Yeah, what is it? So it depends on where you were, you know, where you were from, what kind of grass you want and they have that. Yeah. Now, what if I just come to you and I say, you know what, David, look, I've got five acres, but I've got this acre over here that I want to do something cool, but I don't know what I want to do. You can help me. Yeah, we design. We have free ideas. We usually, you know, we like to start with the people in the minimal amount that they know that they want, because most people don't know everything they want. They start the minimum or this, right? Right, right, right. And they're like, what are you going to do out here? You know, so the basic question is to help them along and they can, they're designing. I'm just giving them the options. In the end, you know, they came up with something they really wanted. I'm not showing something on them that they made out of one of their never going to use that like a pickleball court. Like a pickleball court. Yeah, right. It feels so bad for my neighbors, but they did get the pickleball

6:20court. Do you guys do like water fountains or water designs? We do water features or fountains. You know, it's a centerpiece. They're, they're, you know, it's kind of hit or miss. It depends on where you live. If you put in a water feature, you may be creating your own ecosystem. You're going to have mice coming in or birds coming in. You have things that eat the mice to the birds, you know, and then you start getting messy as bird, you know, droppings all over the place. So a lot of people don't consider that or I wouldn't have or a coy pond, you know, I spoke to a man yesterday who's wanting a coy pond. I said, well, if you ever had coy or goldfish up here because we have raccoons and we have herons that just come out of nowhere and you just find your fish and start missing, you know, and so it's, we have put in some water features where the people have us come back and take them out because they have a leaner coming in for water and then they had a mountain line coming in and taking out the havelina right there in the back patio. So it's like they want the water noise, but there's a lot of things come with the water here because we're such a deserty region here. Go on YouTube and just have it play. Yeah, I want to hear the trickling water. Yeah, put some outdoor speakers in and just

7:23enjoy the water without the water. It's smart. Okay. All right. I like that too. Any big projects you got coming along? We have a couple big ones coming up on this summer. Summer's actually already started next week's going to be in the 90s. So I don't know, I'm kind of blocking it. When is summer? I think we're in it right now. I think we're in it. Yeah, this is definitely for the July's. We're on the corner. Combo's a huge patios with a bunch of artificial turf people wanting to wait for the weather to pop before we get started on it. Well, there's here, right? That's here. Yeah. Well, there's here. So go on through the website. If you guys are interested in just some ideas of what you want to do with the backyard or a side yard or a patio, your website has motivated me more than anything. So I'm like, oh, we've got a little indoor patio, but I want the kitchen. I want the fireplace and all of that because it's this makes me want to go outside looking at your website. And that's the purpose of it. It's an outdoor video book is what it is. If you got ideas, Kristen has different brackets on there. You can go to each different bracket. You can look at samples. And that's just a smidgen of what we've done. You can only put so much, you know, on

8:26a website. Okay. So you guys want to figure out creative outdoors. You want to figure out what to do with that side yard or the patio, definitely give David and his crew a call. You'll walk them through it. And if they don't know what they want to do, I can help them with that too. I don't know. Yeah, right. Well, especially when you have, you know, some people have a lot of acreage, some people have small amounts of yard, but they still want it to be nice. And you do need a great big space. If you live on a hill, you're maybe not going to have the backyard, you know, this can take some retaining walls or some terracing or whatever else. So it depends on what terrain you're living into or you're in the clay or you're in the boulders, you know, there's different things that come into factor. And do you see people too that are getting ready to maybe sell their home and they want to up the value and that's why they'll give you a call? They do. The common thing is they want to put a little bit of artificial turf in the back because they're hoping to sell to people who have some dogs because if people have dogs, they want to be able to, you know, so somebody might put in a, you know, a pretty affordable fence and maybe a turf area because they know they're going to sell or they have a pitted or cracked up driveway or the roots are pushing it up. They

9:30want to improve that because they don't want people to buy the house and, you know, eat that cost. So we'll come and do payers a lot of time and you kind of get an idea, you know, these people, they're not real that particular and what paper it is or what color it is, you know, they're looking to just sell it out. But I can imagine if you're driving by a house and you've got this real pretty, you know, driveway that's going to help get people. And the curb appeal is the big thing. Yeah, definitely. Well, if you want to improve your curb appeal, you want to be able to spend more time outdoors because every time it keeps rotating and it keeps seeing that picture of the big fireplace outside and it's like, okay, I want, I want to go there. Yeah. So you're 928-445-1096 creative-outdoors.com and you'll help get us where we need to be. Yeah, it's always say if you want to get creative, get creative outdoors. Perfect. This is great. Thank you so much for coming in and making a basket and the surrounding area is so beautiful. We're trying to, in some of our bigger jobs have been in the valley, you know, we'll go down there because we're just, we have a reputation. Yeah, that's great. That's good to know too, that people, because we always think we've got to go

10:34the valley to get full stuff and you've got people from the valley. We're statewide. You know, if the project calls for it, we'll go down, I mean, we actually worked in, we were licensed in Utah, it's on hold now, but we've done a big project up in two different, two big ones in Utah. We won best of show at the parade of homes in St. George back about 15 years ago. And we've done some monster jobs. So we go where the work is. But that's interesting. I mean, that is a good point to hammer. And because it's, you know, everybody thinks, well, oh, I'm going to call them because, you know, obviously in the valley, it's better. But when you've got people that are, you know, they've got a place on every corner that they could call, but they're calling you. We just, this past week, we've repaired one that was done by a company that was supposed to be top-notch out of Phoenix. I'm like, you know, telling my customers that you had been far better off hired somebody from up here. And just because it's Phoenix doesn't mean that people are better, they actually take a lot of shortcuts. And Phoenix said, you won't get away with up here. And, but per capita here, we have far more landscapers than they do in Phoenix. So there's a lot to people to pick from here. And where are you actually, you know, when, you know, you do a job

11:36for me, I'm going to see you at Costco, I'm going to see you, you know, walk around. We've been here everywhere in the series too small. And most of our work is word of mouth. You know, we do a lot of advertising, but most of our work is word of mouth. I can see why it's so beautiful, so beautiful. Well, if you want to start planning your outdoor, I want to call them adventures because that's what it is. It's just so beautiful. Check out the website. Don't take my word for it, creative-outdoors.com. Give David a call, 928-445-1096. And just keep doing what you're doing now. This is great. All right, guys, we will see you next time.