The Driveway

I plan on finishing the driveway today. Everything this week has pretty much gone as expected, although I still need to spread one more load (about an hour) of gravel/sand this morning before moving on to the bricks. I could have bought it yesterday and driven home, but that would have saved no time whatsoever. Spreading it yesterday was not an option since I need to make this very level and there wasn't enough daylight left to be able to really see what I was doing.

So my plans for today are, get the base material and spread it, then move on to the bricks. The driveway is about 37 square feet per side, and a brick weighs in at 0.2 square feet each. This means I need 370 bricks. Each brick is 35 cents, so this won't be a huge cost. However, a brick paver weighs about 4lbs each. This comes out to just under 1,500 lbs so I'll have to make two trips.

Tomorrow I plan on starting/finishing the landscaping, as well as figuring out what to do with about a yard and a half of dirt that I excavated last weekend. I may build up the high side of the house to try and keep water from pooling up in the area but I have no clue what to do with the rest.

Pics to come once there is something more interesting than a pair of holes in the ground to post.

At home, I haven't really done a lot. Staining a little bit of the deck has been disappointing and I've really been focusing my energy on the house on Poplar St. The only reason I'm bothering to stain this 10 year old wood on the deck is because I'd like it to last just a few years more than it otherwise would have. I'm not ready to decide what to do with that part of the house and this will buy me a little time to figure it out. I'll probably keep the outline of the deck the same (The structure is fine) and drop it down a step. There's a strange step up/step down to go out the back door and dropping the deck a few inches should take care of that, in addition to resolving a small code issue since it's a few inches above the limit where it needs railing and a hand rail on the stairs.

I've decided that I want to go with a Miele dishwasher (translation: this will be in the proposal to the wife), and that it would be really nice to work with a kitchen designer to finalize the layout of this thing.

December Already?

I can't believe it's already December...

Not a lot has gone on at either house since the last update. I had to spend a lot of time catching a car up on maintenance so we could go on a road trip to Maryland over Thanksgiving, and since we got back I've been trying to get over a nasty cold. Every day I think I'm finally better only to realize that I'm not quite there yet.

I measured the driveway next door to the house on Poplar St since that's the design I intend to copy for ours, and dug out the two tracks that need to be excavated. This may be part of why I'm still getting over the cold... in any case I wanted to add the road base and compact it today but that's not really looking very likely because that would be hard work.

I can, however, do easy work... I already removed the paint from the bottom panel of the middle garage door so I can sand and finish that, and standing around with a power washer isn't hard work so I may clean the deck and stain it this weekend.

Pics to come if any of this happens...