Needless to say, this home improvement project can not be wrapped up fast enough! The amount of dirt, mud, rocks, dust and just general mess over here is out of control.

But after tomorrow, almost half of this battle will have been won. Why? Because my first cement truck rolls up the driveway first thing in the morning and pours enough concrete to cover a fair amount of this space.

I can. not. wait. !!!

Thankfully we haven’t had rain this week, just very very cold temps. So that has worked in my favor and we were able to knock out this end of the driveway this week. It’s been quite the week getting to this point. Photos, shall we?

Last Saturday morning our cat rental showed up and we got to work digging up all the old asphalt, concrete, dirt and rocks…

We worked all weekend turning this mess into an even bigger mess!…

 

 

 

Told you – hot mess!

Even the left side of the front yard didn’t get away from the cat…

Some decisions were made on the fly last weekend. Decisions like pulling apart the only pathway we had in the front of this property. Since I’m unsure what exactly will happen with the front of the house during the kitchen remodel, I didn’t want to touch anything in front. I was basically planning on leaving this little path in tact until after the kitchen remodel…

But my concrete guy encouraged me to go for it and take it out. Why? Because we had the cat here now and were paying for the rental now. So why not just take it out now? It was a touch decision, but I decided to remove it and we’ll instead add some pavers as a temporary walkway from the driveway to the front door.

Out it went!…

Talk about door to door service….my truck can almost pull right up to the front door now – ha!…

Except plywood is now our glamorous new walkway…

Yes, friends. Because nothing says “welcome home!” like 3 sheets of plywood, a random stack of old bricks, 2 wheelbarrows and a filthy construction site. Yea, baby – welcome home!

This pile was once my little path. *sniff sniff*…

Onto bigger and better concrete friends!

Once the driveway was completely demo’d, time to start the framing. This is the path near the swing set…

In front of the garage doors…

What will be planters around the garage doors…

 

Where you see framing means beautiful, flat, clean, glorious concrete!…

 

 

 

Plenty of room to drive in, park cars (in or out of the garage) and ride bikes…

 

For the last couple days we’ve been leveling, laying rocks and setting up the rebar…

 

Yes, those are flood lights because my boys roll hard. They are out there until almost 9 or 10 each night…

 

 

We can not wait until that cement truck rolls in tomorrow…especially the kids! So excited to watch this area get filled in. Some before and during shots…

 

 

 

Since there is only one way in and out, we decided to break up this job. This end of the driveway will be poured this weekend, then we wait 2 weeks to pour the remaining (left front yard and full tree tunnel driveway). This way we can get in and out of the house. We can’t walk on the concrete for 3 days and no driving on it for 2 weeks. So this will be fun, for sure.

Here’s the left front yard and driveway at the moment too…since we’re talking about them…

 

 

Fun times over here people!

But it’s all good. No complaints. Forget about Santa…a new driveway in coming to town.

I’ll share pictures and video of the concrete pour this weekend on instagram. If you aren’t following me over there, come join me. If anything, I promise to give you something to laugh about = me!