Saturday, September 10, 2011

Me and My Indecisive Brain..

Is it that I'm indecisive, or am I a perfectionist? Either way, I ripped up everything I did last Monday. The whole sidewalk.

Let's start this at the beginning. This morning I went outside to work on the sidewalk. I gathered my bricks and tools and got to work. As I was working, I realized that if I pushed the bricks up closer to each other, the joints were smaller and looked better. Long story short, when the bricks were more level, the joints were smaller. So I ran inside and got the level. Now that I was able to make them 100% level, I realized that my bricks from Labor Day were slightly off. So after doing about 4' of new brick, I went back and started working backwards, leveling the sidewalk. This actually worked out well because I had run out of weed paper and was too lazy to go to Lowe's and I didn't want to put down any more brick without weed paper underneath.

Anyways.... by the time I got back to the beginning, I was off by more than a brick height. The level bricks were about 3" higher than the original ones. I was disgusted with myself! Staring down at it, my dad and I realized what I had done. Last weekend, my main concern was keeping the first row of bricks level with the bottom stone step. From there, I was trying to keep the last row of bricks level with the grass. And the result was a sloping sidewalk. So I sat there and thought about it... A level sidewalk won. I could always build up the grass along the sidewalk and slope it down to the existing grass level. The yard slopes down in that direction anyways, so it wouldn't look weird.
This picture shows just how un-level I was!
Once I was done, I realized that it being level made it look a million times better! It looked more professional. In fact, I commented to R that it looked too nice for our house :) Especially next to the lean-to, which would probably collapse if you breathed near it. (Can you say Project: Summer 2012?)

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