Home Improvement – Driveway and Fence

One of the big areas of our yard that needed some improvement was the driveway side of our house. The side of the house (you could maybe call it a driveway, though it’s not really wide enough to drive a car on, at least if you want to open the doors) was never really finished but was more of a overgrown weed patch that needed to be cut back every once in awhile. Plus if you look at the pictures of our neighbor’s fence, you’ll understand why we wanted to tackle this project. We hesitate to put too many “before” pictures . . .

This project was too big to tackle ourselves, so we had our contractor Mohsen come and pour a new concrete side driveway, build a new fence and lay a paver front driveway for our car.

The view on the side of the house looking towards the street.

And the view looking back towards our garage. We offered to pay for taking down our neighbor’s “fence” and pay for an entirely new fence to be built, but our offer wasn’t accepted.

Here’s a shot of where we used to park our car. That’s what it looked like, cracks and all. The crew had just started breaking up a few sq feet. Also another view of the neighbors fence. Yikes!

We had a big cement truck come and fill up a bunch of wheelbarrows, which were wheeled back to pour the 50 ft long side driveway. That’s alot of wheelbarrows!

Here’s a shot of the full pad after it had been smoothed. The crew had previously set post brackets in concrete so that the fence could be installed (right next to our neighbor’s fence).

Here’s the frame of the fence going in. Fence posts have been set and the top and bottom rails were installed. The horizontal bracing was to “nudge” the neighboring fence back on their side of the property line.

Here are the fence panels going in.

We received three pallets of charcoal and tan concrete pavers.

Chris didn’t like the pattern that our contractor proposed, since he thought it wasn’t “random” enough, but random is hard to lay quickly as it requires alot of thought to ensure that it all fits together. Chris designed and printed out a repeating pattern for the crew, but apparently it was a bit hard to follow and they had to number the pavers to keep things straight.

 Shirley and the baby are checking out the finished product.

Now our car has a nice place to park! Chris has plans to build a nice gate, but that project probably won’t get done for a little while.  All in all, it looks alot better than before. . .

 

 

One thought on “Home Improvement – Driveway and Fence

  1. Swan Lawrey says:

    Yeah, it’s far better now than before. Actually it looks nice now. You have done a good fencing and I think you should go for new door also. I quite like the pattern of car parking area.

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