Curb Appeal, Part 1

Morocco was fantastic. If you subscribe to our travel blog, you can read all about it there.

But when we got home, we were greeted by (1) one very enthusiastic beagle, and (2) gorgeous sunny weather! Yay for spring! Yay for a spring in which it rains during the week and is gorgeous and sunny on the weekends!

Which meant we could finally lay down our front walk! Woo hoo!

You may recall that it started out treacherous, with cinder blocks laid in a pattern sorta resembling a path:



And then, while I was nursing a nastily-sprained ankle, Evan got inspired. He pulled up all the cinder blocks, dug out a path, bought a bunch of gravel, and compacted in the newly dug-out walk way. It's still scary in this picture, but only because it's Halloween:



And then it started to rain for months on end.

And finally, it stopped raining as much, and we though, "hmmm, we should get that new front walk in..."

So, as part of our Home Depot spree, we ordered a pallet of concrete pavers, to be delivered before we left for Morocco. Which happened, but with one small problem....

The delivery guy left them in front of our house, but rather than putting them on the grass, opted to put them on the sidewalk. Blocking off the sidewalk. Which by the way, is illegal in Seattle. And he doesn't move them when I say, well, they're on the sidewalk, and we'd prefer them on the grass. Don't know whats up with that. And he leaves.

So I'm looking at 3000 lbs of concrete pavers that need to be moved off the sidewalk, right away.

I'm forced to because Super Woman.

By which I mean, I move them. All. Myself.

Carefully stacking about 16 of them at a time on our dolly, and carefully lowering the handtruck down the step into the yard, I slowly but steadily, moved 324 concrete pavers, restacking them in the front corner of our yard. It took about 2 hours -- faster than I thought, actually.

And I did this in the rain.

Even though I valiantly saved the day, we still didn't get the path down. It was getting to be crunch time for our trip, and we just didn't have time. So, the pavers sat in our yard for 4 weeks, until the first weekend we were back home.

And then, we got down to business.

Evan went and bought sand. Then, he shoveled the sand from the back of the truck to the wheelbarrow, from the wheelbarrow to the gravel path. And I used a hoe to spread it around, as evenly as possible. And then we threw the dog back in the house, because he kept walking around our newly spread sand (he was unhappy at this development). Then I cut a board to the width of our path, which Evan used to smooth the sand.

After that, we broke out the plastic edgers, which are long strips of plastic that get nailed into the ground on either side of the path, in order to keep the pavers in place, once laid. Using our fancy board, we slowly worked down either side of the path, carefully measuring and nailing the edging strips in place.

And then the fun part -- laying the pavers!

By this time, Evan's dad had come over to help. So, they carried pavers over to me, and I carefully lined them up, getting them as close as possible. We had to cut a few pavers (using a chisel and a hammer), in order to get our running bond pattern (example) to line up around the curve of the path.

After all the pavers were down, and lined up correctly, Evan and his dad alternated using our fancy board, and a rubber mallet, to tamp the pavers down. This involved laying the board across the pavers, and hitting it as hard as possible with the hammer.

And then, we got out MORE sand! And spread it over the pavers, sweeping over and over again to push the sand into the cracks between the pavers -- the sand compacts between the pavers, and holds them in place. It involved a lot of sweeping, and then some more sweeping, and then coming back to places you'd already swept to discover that the sand had settled, and you still need to sweep more sand into those cracks. We also tamped again, to help the sand settle. And then we swept some more.

And here's the final result:



The dark spot is water, from me watering the newly planted grass seed on either side of the path -- trying to make the lawn pretty again after tearing it up for this path.

Ain't it nice?

In the near future, we plan to run a path down the side of the house, splitting off of this path and going to the back yard. You can see where we've dug out some already. We still need to pull the old cinder blocks up, which constituted the previous side path (much like the previous front walk).

So, we still have a pile of pavers in the front corner of our yard (and a pile of sand). It'll be gone soon enough, and I'll have more pictures to show you!