Yard makeover, stage 2

OK, about a month ago, Joey, Raul and I built some planters in front of the porch to house some hedges, as a first step towards improving the front yard.

The second step in our front yard makeover is to replace the plain, dull concrete walkway that leas from the sidewalk outside the gate, to the steps which lead to the porch. There’s nothing wrong with the walkway — in fact, it’s a nice enough one for concrete — but it has no personality and doesn’t integrate with the yard. I decided instead to have it replaced with a paver-based pattern and expand it to wrap around the steps and along the flower beds which line the gate.

After some research and pricing out, I settled on using the “Cambridge” set of pavers from Belgard, with Holland pavers as a row of “soldiers” along the outside. Something sort of like this:

Once the look was settled, the next step was taking out the walkway itself. This is made to look far easier and far more “fun” on TV and in the movies. Joey found out that a handheld sledgehammer may as well be made of plastic, so he upgraded to a 2-handed one, and found out that it doesn’t result in nice big chunks of concrete that you can pick up and toss aside. Instead, it just pulverizes down a couple inches with each labored swing. He also found out that the concrete is incredibly thick. At least 8″.

So… that job has been delegated to a local guy who mows our yards sometimes. 3 days later, it’s not yet done, and the front yard looks like a bomb went off. Oh, and there’s rebar in there. Whee.

So, Joey and Raul finished busting out the sidewalk, and did a pretty good job of it, by Sunday.


March 7, 2011
Today, the gravel and sand were delivered (2 cubic yards of gravel, half a cubic yard of sand), but it rained during the day, and the area for the new walkway hadn’t yet been roughed out enough, so the large pile remained in the driveway for awhile.


March 8, 2011
The pavers were delivered on today, and they also got rained on. So we’ve had a big hole in the front yard for almost a week, at this point. Everyone has learned how to work around it, but I’m eager to get busy installing stuff, now that we have all the materials and tools. If only it would stop raining long enough for the sand to dry out!

March 15, 2011
Over the course of the weekend, we got the base laid for the pavers. Turns out that while pea gravel isn’t ideal for this, by mixing it with portland cement, you can get a solid stable substrate. So, over the weekend that was done, and Tuesday night was spent screeding the sand and layng the bricks and edgers in place. Later in the week, I swept sand into the cracks between the pavers to “lock” them in place, and compacted dirt back into the holes and voila, it is installed!

We're No. 1!

With our "model" on the front porch

So, another project success! We decided not to put those grey bricks along the perimeter. They will be used in a driveway eventually (along with all the leftover pavers). Next stage to finishing this whole front yard thing up is to plant out the rest of the edge along the fence, and replace the grass. I’ll be getting some nice green zoysia… look for pix and another blog post when that is done (soon, hopefully!)