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.

Photographic proof of dumpster week

I normally loathe putting pictures of myself on the web, but y'all just need to see this. THIS is how dirty it was doing demo work in our house:



We actually had friends drive by, and when I walked out onto the front porch to wave, they didn't recognize me. The insides of our walls are so dirty. I just don't get it. Did the original owners heat the house with coal and not vent the fireplace at all? Ugh.

So let's go on a tour of the demolition area. This picture shows the former location of one of the two walls that separated our house into two apartments.



It used to be the wall that held the door shown on the left of this picture:



(How 'bout that weatherproofing, eh?)

Now that hallway looks like this:



Our stairwell looks like this:



When we were done with the walls, and the crappy tile that covered the original wood floors in the front bedroom and downstairs hallway, there was still room left in the dumpster. Well, we are not people who will send a dumpster away half empty. So Mike sledgehammered our cracked concrete front walkway.

Here's a nice view of his handiwork, and the caution tape we posted until we get a new brick walkway put in. To the right, you'll see the pile of bricks that will be the walkway. Front center, you'll see that we moved our awesome mailbox closer to the road so that our mailman escapes major injury (make sure you click on the picture for the full-size view):



(Digression about the brick pile: as of today, three different people who are total strangers to us have driven by and asked if we are planning to use the brick. I am embarrassed by this as, yes, the brick pile has been out front for a year. But we were busy! We got married! And we work full time jobs! So for all of you locals...yes, we plan to use the brick pile. Soon. Thanks for asking.)

We hadn't had enough fun yet, so we then pulled down the shrub monster. My dad came over with his chainsaw, we cut them down, and then we used Bessie to pull out the roots. Mike was in his glory - using Bessie to rip things out of the ground.



Finally, last Monday, we sent the dumpster away. This pic was taken before we loaded the shrub monster's remains on top.



Best thing about the shrub monster's demise? I get to put my garden in its place:

Meet Bessie

After a number of trips to the hardware store that ended with copper pipe and lumber sticking out of the back of our Pontiac Vibe and Toyota Matrix, we decided to get Bessie. Here she is!



Bessie is a 2004 Chevy Silverado with an extended cab, full-size bed, and towing package. She gets a whopping 17 miles to the gallon, but since neither of us use cars for our work commute, that's not a huge deal. We kept the Matrix, which you can kind of see behind Bessie in the photo above.

Look - Bessie mostly fits in our driveway!

On her first trip to Lowes, she brought home 4 12-foot planks of composite board, 3 full-size sheets of plywood, a glass block window, a shopping cart full of plumbing supplies, and a bag of mortar with loads of room to spare.