It Runs Downhill

These pictures are already a week out of date, but here is some of the drainage and landscaping work I've been doing. Prior to all my work, this area of our yard was a muddy mess every time it rained.

In the last couple of weeks, I've added the brick walk to the left, the French drain, and add a gravel walk to connect the path to the gravel driveway & parking area. This Tuesday I finished filling in the gravel. The next step is complete the rock lined flower beds and start filling them in with plants, mulch, and other goodies. We're also considering a pond.

We've had six months worth of rain in the last six weeks, so the new drainage has been given a good workout - it's worked great! Now, all I have to do is finish it.

I'll try to get more photos, diagrams, et cetera up by early next week.



If anyone wants the Saturn for parts, it's yours. Make me an offer. Seriously. If you jump it, you could probably get it to run well enough to get it on a trailer. I wouldn't drive it more than a few miles on the open road. It might make it. Or, it might not.

The Road To Hell

The road to hell is usually paved with good intentions. In our case, it's paved with around 250 Coffeyville bricks.

Of course our path isn't finished yet, so it will probably take at least that many more to connect the parking area to the front steps.

Somewhere in the Ur-days of this blog, I had a rather extensive post about these bricks. I'm too lazy to find the post so I can link to it, so let me make a brief recap and leave it at that. These bricks are very hard, solid, and heavy because they are made from fired slate. This is far superior to fired clay bricks. They were made in Coffeyville, Kansas, some time in the first couple decades of the 20th Century. They were used to enclose the Devil Queen's crawlspace and replaced a skirt of older, locally-made, clay bricks. And, when we were preparing to move the Devil Queen, every asshole in Russellville with a pickup truck tried to steal them.