Metamorphosis

...and the ugly brick pile was transformed into a beautiful new brick walkway.

The End.

If it were only that easy. Put it this way: I never want to see a shovel again as long as I live. Too bad we live in Pittsburgh and winter is only a few months away.

Remember the brick pile? After we built the stairs, our front walkway looked like this.

I thought pouring the concrete and building the stairs was difficult. Ha.

The first step to installing a brick walkway is to dig down 8 inches from where the top of your bricks will eventually rest. Too bad our soil is all heavy, packed clay. It also hasn't rained very much here, so this part of the job required a mattock and shovel. When that was finished, the walkway looked like this:


The caption of that picture should be "Amy's Sore Back." After digging everything out, Bessie got to go on her bi-weekly visit to Lowes for a cubic yard of gravel.



And then after that, she went for a cubic yard of sand. And then back again for another cubic yard of sand. [We pause here to give a shout-out to our next door neighbors, who kindly let us pull Bessie up on their driveway and then into our front yard so that we didn't have to wheelbarrow hundreds of pounds of sand and gravel. Thanks again!]

The walkway now looked like this:


We didn't get any action shots of us laying the brick, but I'll paint a picture with words. Mike cut up pieces with the angle grinder and laid the brick. I used a mason's hammer to break off all of the old mortar.

Every time I picked up a brick I shrieked. Over the last two years, the most horrifying assortment of spiders (tarantula-sized, I swear), millipedes, and *shudder* centipedes took up residence in the brick pile. Horrible. Horrible. Nightmare-inducing bugs. Every time I screamed, Mike said, "You have a hammer in your hand. Just kill it!"

In the end, it all came together:


Best of all, we could move our "temporary" mailbox - a.k.a. the "ghetto box" - so that our mailman will now use the real mailbox on the front porch.


And they all lived happily ever after.