Free Parking

All of our parking was parallel to our street and typically blocked easy access to our back door.

So we decided to do something about it.

We dug up part of our yard to extend our parking space.

We quickly ran into bricks.

Lots of bricks. What was up with all the bricks?

Curious about the bricks, we carefully cleared away more sod and discovered an old brick path.

Neat!

We think the path might be really old because the bricks were under a very large tree root left from when this tree was cut down.

But who knows?

We dug up about two parking spaces worth of sod. Unfortunately, we had to cut down the pretty Korean lilac to do so, but I took some cuttings and am trying to root them.

When we dug up the old gravel drive in the middle of our yard, we dumped all of the gravel in a  huge pile at the end of the drive next to the street.

Once we had removed all of the sod and raked the new parking area reasonably flat, we started relocating the giant gravel pile to the new parking spaces.

This is my, "Isn't shoveling gravel in the middle of summer fun?" face.

And this is my super stylish gravel shoveling hair style.

Nice! I think I lost a bobby pin somewhere in the pile.

All of that digging and shoveling paid off. We now have parking perpendicular to the street and enough parallel parking for visitors.

Of course, this also means that it's much easier to see our side porch from the street, so I'll have to do some sprucing up.

Because we are lame home-owning grown ups, we are very excited about our new parking spaces.

Joseph, being the smart 1 year old that he is, isn't excited about parking. He's excited about his "water slide".

This is what we do when we run out of swimmer diapers and can't go to the pool. See?

Bahahaha. Baby butt.

Ok, back to our free parking. I'm so glad all of the gravel from the old drive proved to be useful.

Considering how little rain we've had, the lawn is doing okay. Except for a few dead patches left by some glass I forgot to move off the grass before we went on vacation at Myrtle Beach. Whoops.

I like the new parking spaces because they give us a natural starting place for a fence.

Just picture the parking bordered by a white picket fence. I can't wait. Maybe next year. I'd also like to plant another tree in nearly the same spot as the tree that got cut down:

We don't have any shade in our yard and I think a nice, big tree would be just the thing to have picnics under with the kids. Not to mention the bonus of shading the cars during the day.

What do you think?

(Now, if I could only collect a pile of money every time I parked there...)