When we bought the Downtown Luxury Slum and until now, you’ve had to trample over the grass to get to the front porch.
This has generally not been horribly problematic aside from the one hidden hole that I could never successfully fill in and that always seemed to attract unsuspecting ankles.
It took me quite a while to figure out what kind of walkway might look good because the steps are 10 feet wide and the entire length of the walkway would also be about 10 feet and having a square walkway seemed weird. And having half of the steps not leading to a walkway also seemed weird. But I finally came up with a plan and submitted it to the Raleigh Historic Development Commission along with my request to build a backyard shed. The plans were approved way back in July but that happens to also be when we bought the Mulberry House so I didn’t get around to actually building the walkway or shed until now.
I actually started in January, and then it snowed, and it finally got warm today so I finished up!
Here are some progress shots:
I used green spray paint to mark where I needed to dig. Thinking about colouring the entire lawn this way next winter.
After I marked out my plan, I started digging. I had this idea that I would start participating this this cutesy Instagram thing called #RenovationFancyFriday, but it turns out that I am not cutesy.
After getting the appropriate amount of lawn dug up, I laid down some heavy-duty landscaping fabric.
Then I laid down these paver panels and this edging which is basically what allowed me to not have to dig another couple feet and buy a ton of gravel. I’m going to admit that maybe I still should have leveled the soil a bit better before laying bricks, but oh well.
Our very first pile of bricks actually came from the chimney of a house that had been moved from a block away from us. A few more bricks got collected randomly as we went on walks over the summer, and I grabbed a couple from the crawlspace of the Mulberry house. But that wasn’t enough so we went on a search for more.
Andrew helped me collect some bricks from various brick graveyards around the neighborhood. This one is just around the corner from us on our block. Another was a few doors down from his old house. Another yet was a neatly stacked pile that a Nextdoor neighbour tipped me off about.
I love the way the pattern turned out and also how incredibly obvious it is that we did not buy these bricks from a brickyard.
The last step for the actual walkway was filling in all the little gaps with sand, which is honestly still a bit of a work in progress. But this picture was taken the day before it snowed, I think, so the rest of the project got put on hold for a few weeks.
But today I was able to finish up digging the garden beds out a little better and filling them with as much soil as I could fit in my shopping cart.
Hopefully I’ll get to plant some pretty flowers in the next couple of weeks.
The mailman is enjoying the new walkway. I hope someday you will get to too.
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