The Wandering Monk finished up his part of the porch project on Friday. We now have steps.
Since then I’ve been working in desultory fashion (and a steady rain) cleaning up the site and making a start on giving visitors a way to get to that nice new porch.
The concrete chunks on the sides are only to hold down the black plastic, but the ones in the center might become permanent if they embed nicely in the gravel I don’t yet have. Mostly, I laid this out because I didn’t feel up to hauling all that heavy stuff away. But I can see that a salvaged concrete walkway might actually work if I do it right.
Claire, it’s nice to see you realize the potential you first saw in this place. A path made form those bits of concrete would look very nice.
Suh-weeet! Looking good!
Nice touch!
It looks nice, Claire.
I’m curious about the open space on each side of the steps. Are you planning to put any plants there? Or how to enclose the crawl space?
Pat — The original plan was to cover those spaces with cedar lattice, which I might still do. While I consider the options, the gap on the house side makes a nice place to stash a garden hose and the gap on the outside edge is now hidden by a large ceramic pot in which I’ll eventually probably plant herbs or succulents.
Claire, not sure how easy your access is, but we found the beach to be a great place for hardscape materials. We made many trips, loading 5 gallon buckets with small beach stone to make walkways thru the gardens. Back east, a 3x3x2 pallet of beach stone was $625. Here all it “costs” is a trip to the beach.
$625 for a pallet of beach rock, JW? Yikes!
Although I’m close to the ocean as the crow flies, actually getting there is a different matter. But here we can drive on our beaches, so if I do go after nice, smooth beach stones I can pick up quite a few at a time.
For the immediate area around the house, I’m just using 3/4-minus basalt, which comes directly from the local hills and costs $35 a truckload. My main aim at the moment isn’t pretty paths (though those will come), but simply getting rid of as much lawn as possible, especially next to the house.