Redoing Our Front Walk

Our front walk has settled a bit over the years and, since we built it perfectly level, when the snow melts each winter it floods our front walk. All that water then freezes and we are left with an ice skating rink of a front walk for several months.

Ian has been installing patios, walkways, retaining walls and the like for a few years now and decided to take it upon himself to redo our walk and add a bit of a pitch to it so it will (hopefully!) drain into our driveway and then down to the drain in the road.  

 First we moved the two giant concrete slabs we use for steps and then swept the whole walk off making sure to peel back any grass and dirt that had encroached over the side pieces over the past 20 or so years we've lived here. 

 Next he began pulling up the patio pavers (with Evan and my husband's help too). We stored them on pallets so we could move them around and reuse them after grading the walk. 

 

Next we added some stone, compacted it, measured it and put the two big concrete steps back in place. 

Over the next week Ian worked on filling in with finer stone, leveling it the way he wanted, using the compactor to get a nice flat surface and began to re-lay the front walk.

 

It is just a gentle pitch to the drive now. 

We put the plastic edging back, filled in with polymeric sand in between the pavers, and cleaned up the rest of the yard/stone. 

 Ian laid down some loam and seeded it with grass seed.

Unfortunately summer is not a great time to grow grass though; we've either had extreme heatwaves or days upon days of downpours that washed so much of our grass seed away. We'll keep pulling up the weeds and working away at the seeding until it takes but based on all the rain we've had and zero puddles on our front walk I am very hopeful we won't have to deal with an ice rink on our front walk this winter.  

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