Renovation, Part 6!

When we last checked in, the framing had been completed. That was a Saturday. They didn't do any work on Sunday. Or Monday (it was a holiday). Or Tuesday.

By 6:00 Wednesday morning a swarm of people had descended on our yard.

A few things needed to be done before the concrete was to start flowing in just a couple of hours.

Before this project was started we had been sending the water from our washing machine out to the yard rather than into the septic tank. We had the washer drain into a trash barrel that held a sump pump that had a garden hose connected to it. When the washer drained into the trash barrel the pump would turn on and send the water gushing through the hose, under the garage door and out to the yard.

That solution wasn't going to work with our nice, new walkway. We didn't want an ugly hose crossing our new walks. Besides, we eventually want to get the yard nicely landscaped and the ugly hose would look even uglier.

We added a little feature to our project where they would run a pipe under the concrete to the dirt by the driveway. Then they'd run a pipe from the laundry through the wall and connect it to this drain pipe.

In the last edition we saw this picture:

There's a skinny white pipe on the ground running along the garage. I was in a panic. There was no way that that little pipe would be able to keep up with the washer when it is draining. The little pipe was still there on concrete day and we hadn't seen anybody between the time the pipe was set up and concrete day. Yikes, yikes, yikes!

Fortunately, the owner of the company knew the wrong pipe was set up and brought the correct pipes and  everything would be just fine.

The only problem was that the pipe is pretty wide and would need be be set into a trench so it didn't live up in the new concrete. They just couldn't dig the trench through the concrete that held the old gate post (seen here beneath the scarred wall where the post was up against the house):

They had to fire up their jackhammer at 6:00 AM to carve the trench through the old post's anchor. The neighbors must have loved us.

We went off to work while they were doing their final preparations.

We came home to an all-new yard!

There's a pipe sticking out from under the new walk that will be able to carry the water from the washer!

We have a grand walk leading you from the driveway...

...to the front door (and from the front of the garage across the front of the house)!

And at the back of the house!

It's fresh and we can't walk on it yet. This picture was taken from the neighbors' driveway that runs along our fence. We can't see what the other side of the house looks like.

We've achieved concrete!