Finally, free brick!

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Terry Murfreesboro, TN(Zone 7a) May 16, 2002

A house down the road is being moved, and the brick facade has been torn off. The company overseeing the project has told us we can have all the brick we can haul off this weekend, woohoo!

Which means we're finally getting to really start the front landscape re-do. (The shrubs have been gone for a month, and quite frankly, it looks better with just the azaleas than it did with the whole mess of overgrown nandinas and torturously-sheared yews behind them.)

Our plan is to:

1. Widen the sidewalk by running a course of brick on each side of the walk. We'll set it in a firm bed of sand, and put metal edging to keep it straight and level, then use dry mortar or stone dust to sweep in the cracks and keep it in place. (We thought about doing the traditional, permanent cement and mortar routine, but the sidewalk has a few cracks, and if we wind up digging it out in a few years, I'd rather be able to pop out the bricks instead of chisel off mortar.)

2. Then comes a lot of digging, tilling and amending the area between the sidewalk and the house. The soil was covered by landscape fabric - when we peeled it up to remove the shrubs, we found slick, shiny red/orange clay muck :(

3. Then we'll set in landscape blocks next to the sidewalk and create a slightly raised bed, re-position the azaleas in some new peat-filled trenches, add more shrubs, hostas and hellebores and new landscape lights. Top it off with mulch, and we'll be done! (Sounds simple, huh?)

I'll post some "before" and "during" shots in the next few days (and eventually some "after" shots :)

Please wish me luck - we're very excited; we've waited two years to tackle this job, and I think it'll really make a difference in the way our house appears from the street.

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