Our Front Entrance: The Before

You guys, our front entrance is an absolute mess.

When we moved in, the previous owners had some weed-block down, covered with stepping stones and some brown stones. I wish I had a photo of it, but frankly it didn’t look great… so I guess I never bothered to photograph it.

A couple years ago, Travis couldn’t take it anymore and shoveled out the whole area, put down more weed-block, and added nicer stepping stones and river rock stones. It looked really great, until Countess Von Nibbles decided to build a hole directly in the path. {I highly recommend you check out this blog post, if only for the video}

Yes, that’s a groundhog.

She’s no longer with us (untimely death by vehicle) and we re-homed her children, Salt & Pepper, because they lived in the fenced in area of our backyard and decided that they were not afraid of Ollie. {Here’s that post if you want to revisit that cuteness}

Anywhoo, I went a little off track there…

The point is, that after the groundhog ripped a hole in the walkway… then the weeds came in. Because weed-blocker is crap and totally doesn’t work. And we hate weeding, but even when we would pull all the weeds they’d return with a vengeance.

And this is what our front entrance looked like this morning:

We are calling this the BEFORE of this Before and After job. Because while our front entrance looks like a mess today, it will look completely different tomorrow!

Since we ended up cancelling our vacations this year (thanks COVID), we decided to spend some money on hiring a concrete contractor to dig out the mess and put in a stamped concrete walkway.

I’ve looked at his other work and feel confident that he’s going to do a great job. However, for someone who likes to do everything herself, this is taking a big heap of trust. While I have a general idea how the finished product will look, I’m not totally sure how it will all end up, so I’m pretty excited to see the AFTER!