New walkway

Well I did have a post about the work we've done to our yard (specifically our grass) planned, but Matt's computer is being a little bit difficult and not letting me get to the pictures. So instead, I've put together this post, and the following ones, based on the fact that the pictures for these projects were on my phone, not my camera (google+ auto-downloading my pictures finally has a purpose...).

So, here we go:

A while ago, we noticed that our front walk was getting a little shabby looking. Now, when we moved in, we had a nice little walkway from our mailbox to our porch. However, over time it's gotten slightly overgrown. Hoping to encourage the post office to leave our packages on the porch and not in front of the door (This is silly for a number of reasons: first being that you can easily see it from not one but two streets so anyone could steal it and second that there is no overhang above the door AND the sidewalk slopes ever so slightly, so any rain on a day a package is delivered basically ends up all over the package, but I'll try not to rant on about it for too long here). In any case, I decided a little clean up was in order and started ripping out grass with a vengeance:

After the fury died down, I realize two things: First, I had forgotten to take a before shot, and second, we had more stones than I thought. But I did take a picture of the grass nearby, which is basically what the before shot would have looked like if I would have taken it. Yep, it was that overgrown

Now the extra stones I didn't know we had came into play in the form of three square ones, which were jutted right up next to the sidewalk. You can see a corner of one in the first picture, but I had no idea they were there until I finished my grass destruction. Scary really. In any case, I decided to go with a "circle only" design from here on out and just stacked the square ones up next to the stairs (more on that later).

Then, I spread some seed (its blue, you can kinda see it in the picture above). And here's the benefit of waiting a really long time to post, you can see the after after after shot with the grass all lovely and grown!

You'll also notice that those square stones got moved in favor of a nice pot of lambs ear (which I dug out of the front bed where it was both taking over and driving Matt nuts every time he mowed because of a pronounced tendency to creep out onto the grass). But never fear, those square tiles went to good use because I noticed there were already three of them under the first step, so I just copied the pattern and put these three under the second step. Looks pretty good, I think, although sadly it has not enticed the post office personnel to change their habits... looks like we might need an actual sign.