August 23, 2007
Stone walkways
One of the more problematic features of my house has been the approaches. The front entrance has steep wooden stairs that lead mostly nowhere, though at one point there must have been a brick sidewalk. The back entrance has tilted concrete steps that originally led to mud, though I added a lot of sand and eventually flagstone. I'd bought a pallet of mixed stone from Finger Lakes Stone years ago, but mostly it just blocked a corner of the driveway, as it was too heavy to maneuver, and the stones I did place were mostly good for tripping people.
This year, thanks to Josh Dolan, our permaculture consultant, we finally fixed that. Before our wedding, he and some co-workers fixed the back sidewalk, removing the flagstone and finding another layer of flagstone buried underneath the old lawn. With those two layers, they were able to build a new walkway connecting the steps to where the mulch paths begin in our garden.
The new back walk.
In early August, Josh and his crew turned to the front steps. The wooden steps come to a concrete pad, and I'd tried to add some stone, but there's a strange bump in the hillside in front of the house that's meant slips and falls for years. We were out of the convenient flagstone from the back, so they turned to the pallet of stone. An expensive but effective stone-cutting blade from Seneca Supply, just down the road, helped them turn the large blocks into the right size of blocks.
Cutting stone.
Setting the stones.
The result is amazing.
Front walkway.
There's still some work to do, as this walkway only addresses the tricky part from the front door down the hill, and there isn't a path at all from the bottom step down to the driveway. We also need to see how these walkways do with frost heaves over the winter, always a challenging problem in this area.
I've posted a photo gallery of some of the construction and results.
Posted by simon at August 23, 2007 12:22 PM in my house , permacultureNote on photos