Last winter the walkway from front door to car door was a river of ice. I have done several things to change that for this winter… retaining walls, ditch work, driveway re-grading, the way I shovel snow…
The biggest change is still ahead. I want to put 3-4 inches of 3/4″ gravel on top of the old beat up gravel of the pathway, raising it well above the surrounding area. Thus the water and ice will know for darn sure exactly where it is to go and not go.
I had to build a porch or the area in front of our steps would have been lower than the walkway. Definitely not a good thing to have happen.
Tonight the porch got finished. 
Well, kinda, sort-a, mostly finished that is. I ran out of leftover floor covering before I ran out of floor to cover.
I have never forgotten the little placard one of the Hewlett Packard marketing engineers had on his desk:
IF YOU CAN’T FIX IT – FEATURE IT
I didn’t exactly feature it, but hiding it comes darn close in functionality. We were going to have rugs there anyway, for goodness sakes.
Not that it isn’t something I would not prefer to have completed, but it definitely is no longer on the top of my ToDo list.
Also important to me, this should transfer a lot of the wet snow, dirt, gravel and muck to outside my studio door instead of inside it. My room is too small to be messy and I don’t really want to be sweeping and moping it several times a day.
The nook to the right of the steps, just under the window is where our little chest freezer goes. Like it or not, it doesn’t get the fancy snap-together imitation hardwood, unless we do get another box of the stuff to finish the job.
The rise above the current walkway is going to get filled with packable gravel as soon as I can get around to that. So far, I’m pretty happy with how it came together and the results I did get.
