Work has, as usual, been going slowly. The last time I checked in, the yard looked like this:
Not pretty.Now it looks even worse:
Everything has to get worse before it gets better, right? Oh, I hope it gets better...But fear not. The next steps should go a bit faster than the digging did. The soil that we were excavating was very compact and very rocky, which translates into very hard to dig. Besides naturally occurring rocks, there were also chunks of broken bricks (many of which match the house and have probably been buried there since it was built) and asphalt (probably from when the adjacent road was paved) and coal and bone (crossing our fingers that it's not human...though would the city help us dig if it could be a crime scene?). There was also another kind of brick that didn't match the house or the pavers in the yard. I came across a few broken ones, which I dug out and tossed aside. Then I dug out a whole one, then another. There seems to be a whole row of these earlier paving bricks lying about 8" below the line of the existing sidewalk:
Couldn't tell you when or why those were put there.
Rather than dig them all out, we'll leave them there and build on top of them. Now that the whole trench is roughly level (we had to dig much deeper on one side because of the slope to the yard), we can begin the next phase of this never-ending process. I hate to end this on a down note, so here's the only pretty thing currently in the yard:
Couldn't tell you when or why those were put there.Rather than dig them all out, we'll leave them there and build on top of them. Now that the whole trench is roughly level (we had to dig much deeper on one side because of the slope to the yard), we can begin the next phase of this never-ending process. I hate to end this on a down note, so here's the only pretty thing currently in the yard:
3 comments:
Looks like it could be part of an original STREET ... or maybe a path put in by a PO before your yard was built up?
My best guess is that it was part of the yard for the houses that were here before ours was built. None of those pavers have date stamps. The older homes were built around 1870, though, so I'm guessing they're from around that time.
I believe them to be part of the street or possibly an alleyway. You must know that those businesses haven't always been there, nor those streets. I think your house wasn't always the first one on the block. Check it out.
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