Pointman’s Page

The last day of a week long vacation is always as depressing as the first day is exciting and optimistic. Still, it is good to look back on a vacation though I must admit that the weather so good and the Missus and I spent most of the week on 2 wheels. But we did get a few things done…

Last year right before my Brother’s wedding a storm came through and knocked out a huge beach tree right off the corner of the house. Prior to that moss was about the only thing that would grow. But a year with sunshine has made a world of difference and it’s some of the better grass growing on the place (that’s not saying much since if it weren’t for crab grass I’d have no grass at all). With so much going on over the winter that big old beach tree is mostly still laying there but one side had been cut so I worked over the formerly unusable area and cleared the scrub and vines. The charred stump in the foreground will eventually become a semi-permenant firepit since I still have this nostalgic love of sitting around a camp fire. Even if it is only a handfull of yards from the house.

Probably the biggest task, labor and cost-wise, was adding gravel to the driveway. The turnaround specifically hadn’t had any gravel added in 5 or 6 years and even then it was only a few ton since the guy who brought it didn’t realize his hydralic cyclinder couldn’t lift more than a ton or two and we ended up shoveling almost 6 tons by hand. This time I hired someone with good equipment and he spread better than 80% of the 24+ ton. It still took me 2 afternoons with a shovel to get most of it finished though there is still a one ton pile left which will get hauled 100 yards down the drive to fill in a hole.

When I bought my own first motorcyle (an ‘81 CB400T “Hawk”) it was made pretty clear that it wasn’t going to reside in the garage all the time so I embedded a few concrete paving stones in the edge of the gravel turn around to park on. My Shadow is a little bigger but I still have a gravel driveway and still need a place to park and work on it so a few 16″ concrete pavers later….

While looking at the various cast concrete products at Lowes and Home Depot I spotted these nice little 8″ pavers cast to look like 4 smaller pavers and as inexpensive as they were I had to try them out around our outdoor water hydrant.

One of the nice things about living within literal spitting distance of a small river was that when we were laying out all these pieces of concrete I realized I neede sand. So we threw some empty sandbags and a D spade into the trunk and drove maybe 300 yards to fill them up. Ultimately it took all but 1/2 a bag of sand, close to 200 pounds all said.

There is a small dry well underneath the hydrant and I can already tell is going to make keeping the sand in the cracks interesting but I’m hoping it will stablilize. Eventually..

This entry was posted on Monday, May 28th, 2007 at 1:51 pm and is filed under General, Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.