It's a Mud Hole, but it's Our Mud Hole

Yikes!!! That's what we think when we look out our front window. You may say the same thing when you look at the pictures posted along with this blog entry.

Yesterday, we started work on the front yard in preparation for the front porch that we will be building and the work we have planned to increase our curb appeal. We will be tearing out our broken concrete sidewalk and the front steps that drain toward the house instead of away. In addition, we'll be installing either a new concrete or paver sidewalk and building an inviting cedar porch-like deck on the front of our house. We will also re-seed our entire front lawn as the grass seems to have disappeared and turned into creeping charlie, clover, dandelions, and crab grass. We should have a beautiful new look from the curb when we are finished.

But for now... yikes!!! We really had awful weather for an outdoor project yesterday, but we marched forward anyway. It was fairly dry when we started tearing out the sidewalk, but soon the showers began. And it rained and rained and rained all throughout the day.

The guys continued to push on, tearing out the steps to our front door. Once the steps had been removed, we discovered a major source of the water that had caused problems in the basement for the previous owners. The honeycomb concrete block near the front door was broken and in need to patching. Well, that's one more item to add to our list of home repair work...


The guys also started tearing out grass and the sidewalk on the side of the house, but as the rain poured down it soon grew so muddy that the bobcat got stuck and had to be rescued with a truck. Needless to say, we had to postpone the rest of the work until next weekend after everything has had a chance to dry out.


So we're doomed to mud and dirt for at least another week. We built temporary stairs for the side door and plan to build temporary stairs for the front of the house as well. We also have a concrete guy coming over today to give us a quote on re-pouring the concrete sidewalk in the front and on the side of our house. Hopefully his quote will be reasonable, otherwise, we'll begin the process of planning for a paver walk.