Welcome

We’re now the proud owners of a front entry we can use!

To back track a little….

Yesterday, Norris and Rod completed the retaining wall. They put a piece of filter cloth along the inside of the wall (shown below draped over the wall, but you can’t see it now). This cloth allows runoff water though the wall, but keeps the soil on the side of the wall where we want it:

After the filter cloth, they proceeded to build up the wall.

Once the wall was as high as they needed, they brought in a truckload of fill and brought the grade right up to where it ought to be. Here’s a view of the wall with the new grade:

By the end of the day yesterday, the house was (finally!) sitting properly on the land:

This morning, Norris returned to place the stone steps, to put some top soil down, and to smooth everything out for us.

Here’s Norris (and excavator) lifting and positioning the large, platform rock (regular readers may recognize this rock as the one that’s been sitting in the front yard almost ever since the house was moved):

After that, it was just a matter of placing the top step, which is the same rock that was the front step to the “old” house for as long as we’ve lived in it. Here’s a view from the side:

This morning, Michael had the brilliant idea of using another beautiful, big rock as our step off of the end of the porch. We had been using the top platform from the original (awful) front steps, and it worked, but looked kind of unfinished. This looks better, but we still need to level it:

Norris piled up the rest of the big rocks around the property near the head of the driveway so that we can use them later on for other projects.

I want to get a nice picture of the front of the house straight on, without the excavator (which left shortly after I took the last of these pictures), but I’m waiting for the sun to cooperate and get behind me.