#44. I paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

How sad it is for me to write a blog with this title. However, I built a house of concrete, roof of steel and floors of porcelain so a paved paradise is a given. Hopefully future blogs will be of a more environmentally friendly nature.

This driveway had several initial plans that looked promising and consumed many hours of planning but that never really made it to the starting line. The first plan was a simple concrete pour that would flow with the larger sidewalk that we installed. But we thought that was too safe and moved onto a concrete pour with a stamped design (and later a stamped design with color). I didn’t really like the stamp options and also felt we would mess it up somehow. I then decided to install a paver block driveway that would have several colored 4" x 8" brick pavers in a herringbone pattern. I thought we could save money by making our own pavers and I purchased some forms and stated making some. I needed over 2,500 pavers and figured our production would never make enough. I got a quote of P23/paver but that came to over P50,000 without the base sand. Also, none of my laborers had ever installed a herringbone paver pad. I then finally settled on a concrete pad with 30 cm square tiles. This is coming in at over P70.000 ($1,300) but at least it is getting done.

The initial concrete pad is sooo nice to have. It gets rid of the dust and mud that was a constant cleaning issue and the feeling of exiting the car onto a pad and walking up a sidewalk is great.

I wanted to wait and take a picture of the driveway after its been completed and cleaned. However, the balance of the tile order was delayed and we had several broken boxes, resulting in delays on the installation.

We now have the driveway and most of the sidewalks installed. This allows us to proceed to the landscaping — our next blog.