Driveway Chronicles, Pt. 1

While Mother Nature is tearing things down left and right, we’re doing our little bit to build things up. When we bought our fixer-upper, one of the items on our major house-projects list was to replace the cracked and shifting concrete driveway. Now, a mere 26 years later, we are having it done. The proximate cause was a desire to have Allysen’s mom be able to walk on it without risking her neck. But the guy who shovels the snow every year (me) was not above putting in that he wouldn’t mind having a smooth surface to scrape away at.

Many daunting tasks needed doing to prepare for this undertaking, but the hardest for me psychologically was taking down (even if temporarily) a big section of fence I just built and installed a year ago. Here’s how it looked before today.

The paving crew arrived at 7:30 this morning, which anyone who knows me knows is only a theoretical time of the day, as far as I’m concerned. We had to be not just awake enough to move the cars out of the driveway, but awake enough to discuss design details and make decisions. I wonder if they started this early when they built Rome in a day.

Here’s how things looked, soon after, as they tore up the old concrete:

And cut away the most cracked and crumbling part of the garage floor:

And installed the line of granite cobblestone that will edge the driveway:

And smoothed out the newly patched floor:

And laid out concrete pavers on the new patio-in-progress:

And…dumptrucks!

All that has happened today. And they’re still out there working.

(To be continued…)

 

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