Norton Road: Dear Walkway, Good Riddance!

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Dear Walkway, Good Riddance!

Hi everyone,

Tonight I'm posting pics of our new walkway. It's been a treat and a luxury to get to this point — I have wanted this walkway gone since I got to this house!

To take a step back, there is a large brick wall at the front of our house connecting it to the sidewalk. The wall isn't in great shape by any means, but it's not in terrible enough shape that we can't get a few more years out of it. Which is what we decided to do after getting the estimate for the new wall we wanted :)

In the meantime we are growing fig ivy over it —the best disguise we can find!

As a consolation prize for no new wall, I got to re-do the walkway, which originally was not as high on Mike's list as it was on mine. Small victory, happily taken.

The original walkway I dubbed "The Yellow Brick Road" because it was a windy brick road connecting the wall and steps to the house. It wasn't that it was bad...it just wasn't right for the remodeled version of our house. We wanted something more modern.

The original walkway

We knew we wanted some form of pavers – and here are some photos that gave us inspiration to get started:

We had to find a way to do what we wanted above, but in one of the oldest neighborhoods in the South, without the neighbors hating us. We worked with Paragon Landscape to find a perfectly smooth bluestone that could be cut into pavers – originally the thought was concrete, but given that it wears and ages, as well as that bluestone was a better fit with the house colors, we went with that.

We decided on a 5' x 1' cut of each stone and ordered 16 pavers to be laid in.

While we had a drawing for the way they would go, there was a bit of give and take
and so it was important to be on site the day of to get them spaced and placed correctly.
These are the first two we got placed, which determined the space apart from one another.

Here are the rest as they went down. You can see there is a large tree to the right that
we had to work around – which is what determined the original flow of the stones.

Here is the final product [with the caveat that we can't cut our grass right now as it's new seed – so ideally the grass would be shorter on top of these!]