Exciting Day

Let me just preface this post by saying that not everyone will find my day's events as exciting as I did. That being said, something that I have been hoping would happen for about a year now finally happened today, AND I got a bonus, too.

Last year, there was a meeting concerning the drainage problems in my neighborhood - specifically, directly in front of my house. You see, whenever it rains here, the water pools in my driveway and all along the sidewalk in front of my house. A while before this, my next door neighbor complained, and the county came out and rerouted the sidewalk in front of their house and put in a drainage ditch. It fixed their problem, but made ours even worse. So, the county came up with a plan to fix the problem once and for all.

After telling us all what the plan was to fix the problem, they told us that they had to wait until the summer to work on the project because they didn't want to block the sidewalks during the school year. Well, the summer came and went, and nothing was done. I figured that maybe they had decided to scrap the project due to budget cuts or something like that. I had completely given up on it ever happening.

Then this morning, a man knocked on my door to inform me that they were indeed working on the project and that they would be replacing the piece of my driveway between the sidewalk and the road (as called for in the project plans). Of course, my sidewalk was very uneven, so the project manager called the county guy to get approval to replace the section of sidewalk in my driveway, too.

After a while, the county guy showed up to check on the job and see what else it was that the project manager wanted to add on. In talking to the county guy, I mentioned how horrible the next section on my driveway was going to look next to the new sections since that section was all cracked up and uneven. So after talking to the project manager and thinking about it for a few minutes, he came back over to inform me that they were going to do me a favor and replace that section also! Woo-hoo!

Here's a "before" photo of my driveway. You'll see what I mean about the cracked up section of my driveway and the uneven sidewalk. You'll also see the remainder puddle from last night's light rainfall.



I was so excited about this wonderful turn of events that I took tons of photos to document the destruction of the old driveway and the construction of the new driveway.

These first few pics are of the crew tearing up and removing the old driveway sections.








Katie had fun watching the guys work. She was rather impressed with the large machinery being used.


More pics of the destruction and removal of the old driveway...





Here, the worker used a machine to tamp down the ground in preparation for pouring the concrete for the new driveway.


Here comes the concrete!



Next, the guys level out the poured concrete.



Ooh! More concrete!


Now, let's smoothe it all out.


And, again, more concrete!



So, how does it look?


Apparently, not quite good enough for my perfectionist construction workers!


Now, this is what I call a beautiful driveway!


Of course, there seems to be something missing. I can't quite put my finger on it...

Oh, yeah, that's right! It needs a little personalization!




So now, Phil and I have to borrow my uncle's pressure washer so we can clean up the remaining section of the old driveway (the part where I park my car) and the sidewalk leading to the front door to make it match the new section better. While we're at it, we'll also finally remove the green stuff (algae?) that runs along the bottom of the front of my house so that won't look so bad anymore, either.

Oh, and if you made it all the way through this post, thanks for sticking it out with me. You're the best!