We seem to have our own ‘diggy-thing’ this week.
We also no longer have a lawn to speak of because said ‘diggy-thing’ has destroyed it in the process of tearing down our courtyard walls and deconstructing a 74-year-old concrete patio behind said-now-missing courtyard walls. The plywood is covering the windows and French doors from our dining room to the no-longer-existing-courtyard.
The now-missing-walls were pretty much only standing because of the flashing on top holding them together, and the no-longer-there-concrete-patio-once-covered-in-terra-cotta-tiles was cracked and in several places owing to shifting ground-resulting-from-changing-water-tables-because-of-shitty-construction-across-the-road eight years ago.
So now all that broken and rotting structure is gone, some pretty decent soil was removed and has been left for us to use around the garden, and a new patio base is in place. We removed trees and shrubs from within the courtyard, with the exception of a large palm that I grew from a tiny little plant no more than a few inches tall; I bought it, along with two others, in a pot, for eight dollars some twenty years ago and, when we moved here in 2013, it went into a pot for a year or so before finding it’s (hopefully) forever home in the corner.
New walls will go up in the next couple of weeks and they will have to work around the palm. Every other plant I can hack up, dig out, move around, or say goodbye to, but the palm stays.
A new patio will be poured.
We have to decide what the surface finishing will be.
And then the next phase begins.
That will see the driveway ripped out and the partial overhang above the garage and the front door torn off. The facing will be refreshed and a glass covered awning installed, along with a partial carport…about half of a full length one.
Then the driveway will be poured and finished. We are still working out the final look, but probably a series of concrete slabs, or a pour that makes it look that way, with either wood grid-work or, more likely, artificial grass between the slabs. We face north on this side, so all we can grow is moss; real grass won’t work.
And so it begins….