After reviewing all of the pictures for this project, I now realize just how ridiculous and labor intensive this project was/is (it's still not done!). It required so many steps to get to a somewhat decent looking end result. The reason we started this project began with a leaking basement. Every time it rained, or when snow started to melt, water would seep through our foundation. Luckily, our basement isn't finished so we don't have mold concerns.
Why was the basement so leaky? Well, our sidewalk was sloping towards the house. It might be a little hard to see, but take a look at the picture below. Years of rain running towards the house also caused the basement walls to crumble a bit (I will show you that project another time. Don't you worry.) The only solution that I came up with was to rip out the sidewalk, repair parts of the exterior foundation that have crumbled away, bring in dirt to get a proper grade away from the house, and then use the busted up sidewalk to make a new path around the house. Sounds simple enough, right?
I had been planning this project since we moved into this house two years ago, but with so many other things going on, I was afraid to start it. Then, one day in May, I thought 'I wonder how hard it will be to take out the sidewalk?' So it began. I learned fairly quickly that a sledge hammer is a glorious tool that even I can wield. And wield it, I did.
There was a lot of damage on this corner of the house from water. The facial layer practically fell off. So that was a fun treat...
We rebuilt the surface with cement. One of the worst parts about this project was that it required a lot of dry time. I am not a patient person. Once we applied the cement, that had to cure. We tried to give it a few days of no rain to make sure all of the moisture was out. Then, we had to seal the new cement. We used two products to do this: white Watertite for above ground and black foundation coating for below ground.
I had to keep telling myself that everything was going to look worse before it looked better. We had so much work to do before I could get to the fun part, which was putting the sidewalk back in! I kept staring at this pile in my backyard. This huge, precariously stacked pile. Someday, it would have a new home.
The digging, scraping, patching, and painting continued around the house. Once one section was finished, we would fill in the trench with dirt we had available, and move on to the next.
It was a glorious day when we reached the front of the house. We had to do some tree/bush removal before we could get to the foundation, though. I'm starting to wonder how we accomplished all of this in a couple of months...
Okay! Trees removed, trench dug, concrete patched and sealed! Now, we just needed more dirt. We bought a yard of black soil from a local landscaping place and tamped and filled the remaining trenches. Since we didn't invest in a tamper, this process involved me stomping on the dirt, layer by layer to make sure it was adequately packed in. Any extra dirt was piled up next to the house to use to set the sidewalk pieces.
We used a flat shovel to level the ground where our new path was going to go. Since all of the sidewalk pieces were irregular in thickness, we didn't mess with being too accurate at this point. We then moved all of the pieces off the giant pile and laid down a general outline for the path. It was starting to come together!
As I have said in previous posts, my mom is a beast when it comes to physical labor and making weird projects come together. I enlisted her help when it came to setting the pieces of the path. I still wasn't 100% sold that this was a viable idea, so I needed her 'We can make it work!' attitude.
We installed the path in one day. I don't know how my body handled lifting all of that concrete, but I don't plan on doing that much labor in one day again for a very long time. Jake put in the landscaping edging and an additional fence panel, I pieced together the path, and my mom fussed with the irregular pieces to get them to stop wobbling. Go team!
Things we learned: Use water to get the dirt packed under the pieces and to make a mud that 'glues' the pieces where they need to be. My mom filled dirt between the pieces, sprayed the area down with a hose, and then shoveled more dirt between. Sand would have been an excellent base, but I want to plant creeping thyme between the sidewalk pieces, so I thought dirt would be better in the end.
We didn't use a level or try to be exact with getting the path put in. We eyeballed the height of each piece and accepted that the end result wouldn't be perfect. But, overall it actually looks pretty legit.
The last part of the path needed to meet up with our front sidewalk. I think this little section is what I like most about the project. Part of the front sidewalk was breaking away from age, so we used that to have a natural transition from whole slabs to broken pieces. It's surprisingly nice to look at.
Some of the pieces along the path were still wobbly once we were done for the day, but after a few rains everything settled perfectly.
We still have a lot of work to do, but we've made quite a bit of progress! The weekend after laying down the recycled sidewalk path, we were able to fill in our rock beds. We even made a flower bed around our front tree with smaller pieces of the old sidewalk.
Please leave comments below! I would love to hear your feedback on our project. Or, let me know if you have questions. Thanks for checking out my post. If you liked this one, please check out the links below for some other projects.
Project 1012: Kitchen Makeover
Project 1012: Adventures in Refinishing Our Hardwood Flooring
