I have a handful of old slides, they are mostly from the 60s, from around the house. From those slides, I knew that originally there was a sidewalk from the driveway around the garage to the back patio. Here are snapshots of a pair of them, from 1965 – I don’t have a good slide copier quite yet, so the quality isn’t that great:
The sidewalk was made of concrete, and as such it broke apart over the years. I’m guessing it was taken out sometime in the early 1980s by my grandparents when they replaced the original concrete patio with bluestone pavers, but am not certain. What I did know was that I a sidewalk was not only eminently functional, but also looked really nice – it provided a natural border around the perimeter of the house for planting, etc. In the summer of 2014 I did a lot of work on the front landscaping, so this would be a good chance to finish the landscaping around the entire house.
Before I could begin, I had to do some prep work – there was a raised bed against the back wall that had to come out, and it was filled with a lot of bearded iris that I wanted to move elsewhere. Once these were done, I also had to parge the rear foundation wall to get it back into shape.
With the prep work out of the way, I turned out to be in luck elsewhere – our new neighbors down below were pulling up a bluestone walkway in front of their house to put in a larger multi-level concrete patio. It turned out that the stones were generally 2ft x 3ft stones…exactly what I was laying for the new sidewalk – for a tidy savings of a few hundred bucks. I picked up the rest of the stones needed from a local building supply shop and set to work. Each stone is thick and heavy – 2ft by 3ft by 1.5 inches thick, weighing about 80-90 pounds each. They are mostly just set into the clay soil with some sand to ease leveling. It took about two weeks to get the whole walkway finished up, but the end results came out well, especially once I got some basic landscaping in place. Here are the pictures: