outdoor before and after

Hello, friends!

 We recently had a lot of hardscaping done in the front of our house and I thought I'd show you the before and after photos. 

Our driveway was in terrible shape, as you can see by this photo. It was beyond repair and sealcoating. It needed to be dug out and replaced with new asphalt.

Once the old asphalt was taken out, a layer of gravel was put down.

Our old sidewalk leading from the driveway to the front of the house was dug out, too. You can see in this photo from last summer, how the sidewalk wasn't level anymore and was leaning into the ground.

After the sidewalk was dug out, we also had the contractor extend the gutter downspouts on the front of the garage with PVC piping. He then ran the pipes underground (the lawn had to be dug up) and into the swale in front of our house. Same thing was done on the other side of the garage. Previously, when it rained, the water from the downspouts would pool by the garage and the water would sometimes go under the garage door and get in our garage.

Framing for the sidewalk going in. Instead of the sidewalk having sharp angles like it did before, I wanted it to have a curve.

The finished sidewalk! We also chose to have the sidewalk flared where it meets the first riser of our porch. 

We bought fountain grasses and solar lights at Home Depot and put those along the sidewalk. But silly us...we put grass seed in the dirt in-between the fountain grasses, forgetting that we would need to mow the grass or use a weed whacker ~ without whacking the plants! So, I don't know what we're going to do now. I also think we need to add some kind of edging along the sidewalk on both sides so that dirt doesn't get all over the sidewalk. Live and learn!

Another thing we chose to do differently was the brush strokes on the concrete. The contractor did make traditional horizontal brush strokes in the middle of the sidewalk, but then he asked me what I thought of brush strokes going down the sides of the sidewalk, following the curve. He started to show me what it'd look like in the wet cement and I told him to go for it. I'm glad I did. I think it gives boring concrete a more interesting look.

Brian's been working very hard getting our yard on both sides of the driveway back to normal after the ground being all torn up from installation of the underground gutter pipes. He had to level the ground, pull out all the weeds, put on some fresh top soil, sprinkle grass seed, and then he laid some fresh straw and netting over the entire area, as suggested by the local landscaping company.

Have a beautiful weekend!