The standard DFW suburb backyard: dead side strips, a pool taking up the yard, an exposed fence, and the complete fix

If you live in a DFW suburb and you own a house with a pool, you almost certainly have the same backyard everyone else on your street has.

We see it in Argyle, Alliance, Keller, Aledo, Weatherford, Crowley, Burleson, Mansfield, Forney, and McKinney. Same builder lot template, same three problems, same homeowner frustration:

1. The side yards are dead strips. Two narrow runs between the house and the fence where grass has never grown more than half-heartedly. The dogs use it as a sprint corridor and the sun bakes it from 11am to 5pm. By July it is just hard dirt and weeds.
2. The pool takes up most of the backyard. What grass you do have is a 6-to-12-foot strip between the patio and the back fence. Hardly worth firing up a mower for. So nobody does. So it dies anyway.
3. The back fence is exposed. Maybe it opens onto a greenbelt. Maybe it backs up to a neighbor whose two-story sees straight into your pool deck. Maybe both. Either way, you do not really relax back there, and you definitely do not have your daughter’s friends over to swim without dragging out a 6-foot Costco umbrella for privacy.

That is the standard suburban DFW backyard. And the standard mistake is to fix one problem at a time: install turf this year, plant bushes next year, fight the irrigation guy the year after.

The cleaner play is a complete backyard upgrade. One contractor, one design, one install window. Turf goes where grass does not work. Privacy planting goes where the fence is exposed. Irrigation gets rerouted to feed only what is still living. A new flower bed runs along the back fence to anchor the privacy bushes and give the fence line color instead of bare turf-meets-fence. Everything ties together.

This post is the story of one of those installs. A master-planned community lot with a greenbelt out the back, two dogs, teenagers who basically live in the pool from May to September. The homeowner called us because they were tired of solving the same problems every spring. We came in and did the whole thing in one project.

The brief, in the homeowner’s words

“We want it to look pretty when we look out the kitchen window. We want our dogs to stop tearing up the grass. We want our daughter’s friends to not be on display every time they swim. And we never want to mow again.”

That maps cleanly to four design problems:

1. Privacy: the greenbelt-facing fence line needed a vertical screen of mature bushes plus the gaps between them filled in with shorter ornamentals
2. Durability: the high-use lawn between the pool and the back patio needed to survive two dogs and teenager foot traffic without going to mud
3. Drainage: any artificial turf adjacent to a pool deck has to slope correctly so splashed-out water and rain runoff move away from the pool coping, not back toward the equipment pad
4. Curb appeal at the fence line: instead of turf running flat into the back fence with bushes planted as a single naked row, the privacy bushes drop into a real flower bed that gives the back of the yard color, texture, and visual intent

What we built

700 square feet of Natural Blend Pro artificial turf, sloped at roughly 1.5% away from the pool coping. That sounds like a small number until you realize the entire area is the high-use zone: the strip the dogs sprint when someone rings the doorbell, the walking path from the patio to the diving board, and the lounge-chair zone where towels and wet feet beat the daylights out of natural grass.

Around the turf footprint we set up:

• A new flower bed spanning the back fence, planted with the privacy bushes and edged to tie into the turf border. The bed doubles as the ground-level layer of the privacy plan and gives the back fence color and structure instead of bare turf running flat into a fence line
• A run of privacy bushes along the back fence line, sized to mature fast and tall, planted with enough spacing to fill in over 18 to 24 months without crowding
• Irrigation reworked to feed only the new beds and bushes (the turf zone of course needs none). The old system was wasting water on what is now turf and starving what is now beds. We rerouted, capped the dead heads, and added drip lines to the new bushes

The result reads as a finished backyard, not three different projects bolted together.

Why Natural Blend Pro for around a pool

We install Natural Blend Pro on roughly 40% of our residential pool surrounds. It is the densest realistic-looking turf in our catalog at this pile height, and the spec sheet is built for the conditions around a pool:

• 80 oz face weight at 1-3/4” pile. Heavier than standard Natural Blend, which matters under wet feet and dog-print traffic. The denser pile recovers faster after compression.
• Mini Wave blade shape. Holds its upright posture even when towels and lounge chairs sit on it all afternoon. A flat-blade turf would lay flat by July.
• 27 oz 2-layer PU backing with a 30 inches per hour drain rate. Around a pool, drain rate is the single most important number on the spec sheet. Splashed-out water and afternoon thunderstorms have to clear through the backing before the substrate saturates. 30 in/hr means even a hard Texas downpour drains through faster than the rain falls.
• 15-year manufacturer warranty. Pool surrounds see the harshest UV and chemical exposure of any residential turf install. The 15-year warranty is the longest on any 80 oz product we stock.

The three-tone yarn blend (field green, olive, brown) is what makes it look real even from 6 feet away. Pure green turf reads as plastic. A blend reads as living grass.

The slope detail nobody talks about

Around-pool turf installs fail at one specific number: not enough slope.

The industry minimum is 1% away from the pool coping. We build to 1.5% minimum and more if the existing pool deck allows it. The reason: pool decks already slope away from the pool (per code, usually 1/8” per foot or about 1%). If your turf substrate matches that and nothing more, you have zero net slope on the turf itself, and the first heavy rain pools water along the seam between the deck and the turf.

On this install we set the substrate at 1.5% slope minimum away from the coping, with two micro-channels routing toward the side fence drainage. The substrate is 4 inches of crushed-stone base over a compacted subgrade with a mesh-flow backing sitting on top.

The dogs do not care about drainage math. The homeowner does not see it. But three years from now when their pool surround still looks the way it looks today, the slope is what made the difference.

How the privacy plan works

Privacy is layered. A single row of bushes is a privacy line for about 18 months, then it has gaps, then it has dead-zones where one bush failed, and you are back to a transparent fence by year three.

What we did instead:

• Anchor bushes: taller, fast-growing varieties at fixed intervals along the fence. These mature into a continuous 6-foot screen
• Fill ornamentals: shorter, denser plants in the gaps between anchors. These keep the privacy line opaque while the anchors mature, then provide low-level density once they do
• Flower bed at the base: the bed running along the back fence anchors the privacy bushes and adds a ground-level layer of color and texture. Anyone glancing in from the trail sees a planted fence line, not a single naked row of shrubs. That is enough visual interest that 95% of the time, people just stop looking

The turf takes the foot-traffic zone away from anything living, so the homeowner is not babying a strip of grass that the dogs would have killed by July anyway.

What this kind of install costs

For a typical pool surround at this scope (700 SF artificial turf install, a fence-line flower bed, irrigation rework, privacy bushes and ornamentals), Bearcat-installed pricing in DFW lands in the range of:

• Turf alone (700 SF Natural Blend Pro, install + base + drainage): about $8,750 to $11,200
• Flower bed cut-in + edging along the back fence: $1,000 to $2,200 depending on length and edging material
• Irrigation rework (cap heads, redirect lines, add drip): $800 to $1,800
• Privacy bushes + ornamentals + planting: $2,500 to $5,000 depending on plant size and quantity

Total project range: roughly $13,050 to $20,200. This particular install landed in the middle of that range. Run the Bearcat cost calculator to scope the turf portion specifically for your yard, or request a site walk and we will quote the whole project end-to-end.

Why this story applies to your yard

If you are in Argyle, Alliance, Keller, Aledo, Weatherford, Crowley, Burleson, Mansfield, Forney, or McKinney, the suburban builder template means your backyard problems map directly onto this install:

• Argyle and Keller: larger lots, often with greenbelt or open-space backings, similar privacy needs along longer fence runs
• Alliance and Crowley: newer master-planned communities where the side yards are especially narrow and grass struggles between the house and the fence
• Aledo and Weatherford: Parker County lots with heavy clay soil that makes drainage planning even more critical
• Burleson and Mansfield: tighter suburban lots where the pool takes up an even larger fraction of the backyard, making the small remaining grass strip pointless to maintain
• Forney and McKinney: rapidly expanding eastern and northern suburbs with the same builder-grade backyard template that the western suburbs have

The fix is the same in every one of these zip codes: stop trying to keep grass alive where it does not want to live, put privacy bushes where the fence is exposed, route irrigation to feed only what is actually living, and tie it all together visually so the homeowner stops noticing the problems they used to look at every morning.

Who this fits

You are a fit for this approach if you check most of these boxes:

• You have a pool already in, or you are putting one in soon
• Your lot is in a master-planned community or otherwise has neighbors close enough that privacy is a real concern
• You have dogs, kids, or both, and the high-use lawn zone is constantly losing the fight with natural grass
• You want one contractor to handle the whole backyard (turf, beds, irrigation, plants) rather than coordinating four separate trades
• You care about how it looks from inside the house, not just from the yard

If you also have a back fence that opens onto a greenbelt or open space, the privacy layering becomes the highest-leverage part of the install. The turf is what the dogs and teenagers actually use day to day. The bushes are what makes the family relax outside.

What we do at Bearcat

Bearcat is a DFW landscape and outdoor-living contractor handling turf, irrigation, flower beds, and hardscapes. We are based in Aledo and serve the full Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex including Argyle, Alliance, Keller, Aledo, Weatherford, Crowley, Burleson, Mansfield, Forney, McKinney, Willow Park, Fort Worth, Westlake, Southlake, and Colleyville. Master-planned community installs are the bulk of our residential work.

If you have a pool surround or complete-backyard project (or are about to start one), tell us about your lot and we will scope it end-to-end with no obligation.

Colin & Lindsey Burns Bearcat Turf & Outdoors · Aledo, TX