Concrete Front Walk and Driveway Makeover

Last year, we finally got tired, when it snowed, of shoveling the black gravel that had become our driveway. We decided it was time to bite the bullet and replace both the drive and get a new concrete front walk. I’ll share the walk today, and the driveway next. I know I had blogged about it before a little, but I am excited to share it will you, finally grown in.

If you’ve followed me for a few years, you’ll remember how we had this:

And, then we went to this:

And, finally, a friend was getting rid of old limestone, so we hauled it a load at a time in our mini-van,and started digging.

 

While it was a great free front walk, and it looked pretty for a while, it wasn’t the easiest to shovel. By the end, it had gotten really weedy, so we just kind of gave up.

You can see part of our terrible driveway. The only thing that really made me sad about pulling up our walk, was all of the established plants. To make sure we could replant them,We dug them up, and I put them in a small planting area on the side of the house as a “holding garden” until the concrete front walk was finished.

To save money, we opted to keep our stoop, and just do the concrete front walk part. We had some discussion back and forth with the contractor about adding our curve. It was kind of weird. I wanted it to mimic our other path, and he kept telling us that we shouldn’t be a curve, to make it squared off.  I kept telling him we didn’t want a squared off walk, we wanted a soft curve, like we had on our flagstone path. Design-wise our house was so linear, why would I add more lines, and not break it up? I mean, come on, a split level is about the most linear house you can get; It’s a box, stacked on top of another box.

In the end, it turned out nicely, but honestly, we still wanted more of a gentle sloping curve, but kind of gave up in the end.

It’s such an improvement over the old path.

Within a week, we had the plants out of the holding garden, and back around the new front walk.

This year, we have a lot more annuals, than I normally do, but I couldn’t stand to see blank spots. Plus, I did our local garden walk, so that required extra planting as well.

Luckily, we’ve had enough rain this year, so that everything filled in beautifully. I’m happy that my Mums , and Autumn Joy Sedum are filling in, even though the Hosta have decided they were checking out for the year. We’ve still have had a few,last, warm days so we can actually enjoy the outside for a little bit longer.

 

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