Fresh Pave

The driveway project is on it's way!
It took several days to dig the old driveway up:

 The new drive is now formed (bad nighttime pic from this evening) and ready to pour:

We have decided to spend the extra cash to tint the color of the new concrete:

We were just looking for a richer gray, but there's a whole world of color out there...

Stalking the neighbor's driveway – whose gray color we love!

For comparison, another neighbor with a newer UN-tinted driveway –
we are looking for something less stark in brightness than this.

The tinting is a bit of an investment and I find that most people don't think it worth the spend— you see a tinted drive much less frequently than the regular pour. I think the richer color adds a lot to the overall landscape and am looking forward to seeing how this turns out.

Figuring out what to tint is another story! The sidewalk running in the front of the house is old, and dull gray in color. The sidewalk used to run breaking through the driveway horizontally, then the bottom of the driveway continued down to meet the street.

We have decided to go with Option "B" here which will run the tinted drive
all the way in a single line down to the street. There won't be sidewalk running
through it, however there will be 2 small patches of sidewalk on the left and right
that were dug up thus need to be poured, likely in the untinted color. It will mean dirty
old sidewalk next to bright new sidewalk, which I dislike, but not much we can do about that.

Around back of the house, the driveway continues.

Grated

And with forms

Right up against the house we have also pulled off the worn old painted brick steps and torn up a bunch of old red brick paving that led up to the house. Red brick isn't really my thing so I've been itching to get rid of it and now was the perfect time.

The steps to the backdoor will be replaced (obviously) and
to the left and right of the steps we will create 2 planting beds
in lieu of hardscaping.

For the stairs themselves, we toyed with an unique approach like this one:

Slab stairs sitting on top of inset risers. This particular set is staggered
although ours would have been the traditional centered set up.

But – at the end of the day we went back to the regular stairs. We will pour them in concrete and then top each step with a single slab of bluestone.

The bluestone slabs will connect to those in the front of the house

Given that it was in the 20's today (brrr!), we will pour the new driveway on Monday.
Till then! Have a great weekend everyone!