Appearances. (Walkway project)

Appearances - Woah. Now that word looks strange after I typed it. Kinda like the word itself wants to tell ya something, huh?

No? Just me? OK, I can deal. ;-)

One of the big projects we've been working on recently has us getting ready for tax season. Eh? Come again? Well. I realize that may sound rather strange, but our driveway is not wide enough for both my itty bitty car and my Honey's big bad truck at the same time. It is wide enough for the two sit there comfortably next to each other, sure. But, you'd better pray no one needs to enter or exit those vehicles!

So we have decided that this coming tax return (Oh, please oh please be there like we planned!) is going to be allotted for a driveway expansion. When we started looking into expanding the driveway we found out that our HOA (TSOAG) have their noses stuck up our butts again and refuse to let us do a circular drive that we have plenty of room for, and in turn also refuse to allow us to pour a CONCRETE driveway in order to continue the uniform look of our existing driveway.

Now, you'd think this would be the preferred method of expanding a driveway so that it would be the most pleasing to the eye and the most likely to be done by a proper contractor under the best conditions. BUT, instead they insist that it can be done by pavers, or other such nonsense. Being that we planned on putting a facade of stack stone on the front of the house around the garage this goes against every bit of eye pleasing/decorating sensibility that I have. I REALLY wanted to have concrete poured and have it stamped all the way across the driveway to be uniform. GRRRR.... Instead I'll have pavers, stone on the small retaining wall around the planters and a different stone on the wall of the house. *CRINGE* I'm hating this!

I digress. Since there will be so many types of stone involved we decided to get started early on one part of the project. The only part that we felt comfortable tackling by ourselves and before any of the tax return came in. Stack stone can get expensive and this portion was not nearly as expensive. So we dove in, head first. It took a few weeks of looking around and a whole lot of arguing over exactly what pavers we were going to use. (I like to tans and browns and hubby liked the more mixed pinks and blues) We found some instead that had the slate colors he liked with the browns that I liked and mixed them with the pinks that we already had (that I hate, they are on our pool deck)

Then, we got to work laying them on our sidewalk up to our front door.

Well, it's not perfect for either of us. I suppose it keeps both of us from gloating and we are both equally satisfied that the job is done. We used only the 4" square blocks on the walkway but the driveway expansion that will abut the walkway will use both the larger rectangular bricks and the smaller squares in the pattern. This should distinguish the walkway from the driveway and meanwhile we have a much nicer looking entrance for the next 6 months while we wait to start and finish construction on the other projects. I might attempt the stack stone, but I certainly can not handle the driveway expansion.

I've laid a lot of patios and walkways, like I did this one but something for a (real) vehicle to drive on? No way! Not to mentions the HOA (TSOAG) would certainly be sending me some love letters after that. LOL. At a hundred dollars a day fines I think I'll skip. Thanks anyway.

More projects posting soon, because I've been a very busy gal!

See you soon!

Barbie~

*TSOAG= The Sons Of A Guns*