walkway in progress

On Monday I decided to take on the job, while AJ was working at the house in Gloucester, of getting all the weeds out of our front walkway. As you can see from this photo it was a nightmare to tackle. I first started weeding by hand, which would have been a good idea if I wanted to spend all eternity working on it.

After what seemed like forever, and making about negative progress, I asked myself WWAD (What would AJ do?). He is pretty much the fastest worker I know so I figured he'd just take a shovel and get all the weeds out that way. BEST. DECISION. EVER. After about 30 minutes this is the progress I'd (and my little partner in crime relaxing in his walker) made:



After this photo was taken it wasn't long before Drew wanted to eat so inside we went for the rest of the afternoon... After Drew went to sleep at 7:45pm I put my work clothes back on and went outside... only to get 28 mosquito bites (which of course, some are in the most embarressing spots for itching) in the next hour of ripping out weeds... I was glad that AJ ended up coming out because I'm not sure if I could have wrapped it up in time for the 9pm Design Star if he hadn't. :)

Let me back up for a minute, during the day I called AJ while he was still in Gloucester and suggested that we might want to get some stone dust to spread on the walkway so weeds don't pop up again. He grabbed some at Wolf Hill Garden and for the total cost of $17 our walkway is de-weeded and in progress for some stones or pavers or something... we are still brainstorming that part:

Keep in mind these photos are the "in progress" version... we don't plan on leaving the stone dust for everyone to track into the house... namely because I already feel like I'm sweeping the house 10 times a day.

Just for kicks I put some chairs I found at the dump on the new "porch" area. I'd emailed April (AJ's mom) earlier in the day to see if she and Kerry could measure their porch width for us. We love how there is plenty of room to get around their good sized furniture so we wanted to have our porch be around that width. You can't really see it in this photo because the sun was so bright, but about two feet away from the chairs is a flagstone on the ground, that marks the 7 feet 8 inches that April and Kerry measured out from their porch.

This photo shows the front porch. We knew from the home inspection that this would have to all come down, the bricks are falling out and there is SO much rot going on within the pillars that I have mostly hidden with plants.

The walkway is half done and I'm still scratching those bites (even though I know I shouldn't) and walking with a limp after my ciatic nerve started spazing out.... so I guess the total financial cost of the project was $17, but I've paid for it in other ways too. :)