Renovation, Part 2

A few years ago, we hired a landscape designer to come up with a plan for what we can do with our yard. She came over and got ideas from us about what we wanted. She measured the property and went off. When her initial plans were done we had a meeting to go over some drawings she had made.

I told her that the septic tank is where we pointed it out at the first meeting and it couldn't be covered by anything permanent. We gave her other feedback about her design (like pointing out that plants she suggested would freeze here). She went off and did some tweaking.

At our next meeting I pointed out that we still have a septic tank where she had written "Septic Tank" on the previous plans and in her initial notes and that we really can't have anything permanent over it. And it really does get cold enough here to kill tender plants.

We scheduled another meeting with her. After she was supposed to be here she sent a text message saying something had come up and she'd have to reschedule. We rescheduled for a few days before Thanksgiving. Some time after that meeting was supposed to start she sent a text message saying that Thanksgiving was coming up and that she'd rather meet some other time.

A half hour after that other time came we got a text message saying she had been in a fender bender and couldn't make it. A next meeting could never get scheduled.

After several attempts to have this final meeting Jerry suggested that since she wasn't meeting her side of the contract that maybe we could call it off and she could return the money we had already invested. She said the plans were ready and she would get them to us.

She had somebody dump them on our front porch and left a cheesy turtle with them. The sets of plans weren't even identical. My name was misspelled on one of them. She told us that she had paid her company the rest of the money that was due and that we could send a check to her or somebody other than who the contract was with. Okay...

If anybody in the area is considering somebody for landscape design, check with us to see if you've happened to stumble across this flake.

One of the things that Jerry wanted in this landscape design was concrete to go all the way around the house. We had walks along the front and back of the house (except around the garden room). It was dirt along the sides of the house and asphalt along the garage.

The people who finished our oleander removal project also install concrete.

We engaged them to put in our concrete around the house.

They worked very fast. Initially.

I was going to take "before" pictures of the house. Jerry had said that he took some before pictures so I dilly-dallied. It turned out that his pictures were just of the oleander project. Demolition started before I got to recording what we used to have. I'm having a hard time finding good pictures that illustrate some of what used to surround the house.

This picture from Part 1 shows the view along the side of the driveway and garage after the oleanders were removed. You can see there is asphalt up to the gate at the end of the garage.

Here you see that the asphalt has been removed. And the gate is gone. And the ground to the back of the house has been graded. A pile of stuff that will be pressed into the ground where the concrete is going has been delivered.

Here's a view along the house from where the gate was (well, part of it is still there).

That's a pallet of pavers on their forklift's forks in the distance.

Here's a picture of the front door.

You can see tread marks from their tractor. If you look carefully, you can see that there is no concrete to the left of the steps up to the door. There was some there but it's been hauled off.

The pavers you saw two pictures up were along the side of the garage. Now you see them (from the living room):

Now you don't:

Later that day we took the artwork off the wall so it wouldn't get damaged.

And at the back of the house we used to have a walk and a planter box. I didn't get a recent "before" picture. Here is one I took during an El Niño event (in 1992?):

You can see the walkway in the foreground and along the garden room. The planter has some Lilies of the Nile in it. The red blocks of concrete supported an old shade structure that was falling apart when we moved in in 1988. They were still there before this demolition.

This is what it looked like after they removed the walk, planter and footings of that old shade structure:

No more walk. No big, ugly blocks of concrete. And the ground has been flattened. Soil that was taken out of the yard to make room for the new concrete was moved to the front yard where gophers had made a low region that flooded after rains. No more Lake Bear Valley! (At least it will be just a finger lake.)  The hole at ground level is where a door was before we did our first remodel.

That's Day 1 of the demolition. That's enough for today.