Life At Villa Boswell

This post will be sort of a long pictorial showing how we started the finish work on the lower walkway. The final touches are not done yet, but you’ll get the sense of the scope of what it means to create a raised walkway with fill and concrete, and how important it is to have knowledgeable concrete workers doing the job.

The Before

So, here we are in the before. In the very foreground is the rough cut soil that is thankfully decomposed granite.  Still, that all had to be finished.  There is a good 7′ of clearance between the bottom of the walkway and the underside of the plank going from the lane to the main deck.

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It’s been a long time since my last post, and a lot has happened.  I had this silly idea that I would be able to blog about each main section after it was all complete.  But this house doesn’t go up like that.  It goes up in layers… long, never-ending, maddening layers.  But, we’re getting close.  We’ll be in by Christmas for sure.  In the meantime, this post is about some fixes that we’ve made to the walkway with the help of the Palomino brothers, who are really wonderful.

The Landing

First, the landing to our main doorway was really a problem.  I cannot find any photos of the before, and that’s probably because I was repressing the image.  In any case, the gist of it is that the steps to the main walkway landed in a section that was about 4" below the actual level of the door landing area, so you would have to cross a slight "depression" and then go up again to get to the front door.  This was a result of the height requirement of the stairs.  It looked awful, but Chris said, "We can’t do anything about it; County requirements."  I said:

"You’ll fix it.  You always think of something and then fix it."

The picture below shows the first step in fixing that.  Notice how the landing area beneath the step and the entry pad to the right are on the same level? 

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