This is the front of The Common Cents Home. I love our cute little house. Looking at it, it is hard to believe where it all came from. It is a crazy thing when you buy a fixer-upper, get it all fixed up and then look back at the before pictures. Believe it or not, this is what our home looked like when we bought it just three years ago:
I really don't miss those days of horrid lava rock and broken concrete walkways. When we moved in, we knew that the front yard was a project that just couldn't be put off. We hauled away so much lava rock it was ridiculous. We knew we liked the look of cobblestone, but the price was way beyond what we wanted to spend. We were also faced with the problem of the old walkway. It was cracked and uneven and would need to be removed. Disposing of old concrete is EXTREMELY expensive, not to mention environmentally horrifying.
Our solution was to use our old broken concrete to make a new cobblestone porch. My awesome He-man husband, didn't even like the idea of paying to rent a jackhammer to break up the walkway so he did it all by hand with an inexpensive sledgehammer. To do this, he dug under the walkway in a few places and used his car jack to lift the sidewalk up just a smidge. This created enough give that when he wacked it with the sledgehammer it broke. It was exhausting work, but only took a couple hours to complete.
Once the concrete was all broken up, the fun of creating our new porch began! We outlined the area for our new porch with thin plastic yard edging, then we got busy laying out a cobblestone puzzle with the broken pieces of walkway cement. We moved them and adjusted them until we were satisfied with how they fit together and the spacing between them. To grout the area we used a push broom to sweep mortar cement into all of the cracks, then hosed it down with the garden hose to "set" the mortar.
I love how our environmentally and economically friendly porch turned out. If we were to do the project over again, the one thing we would do different is to invest in sand and lay down a good sand base in the area prior to laying out the cement pieces. Our cement varied in thickness and it was difficult to get it level on top. A sand base would have allowed for a better surface to push our pieces into.
Next week I'll show you my husbands method for creating a beautiful lawn without purchasing sod!
