Project of the day
After the Columbus Day storm (cyclone Freda) came through in 1962 and defoliated our neighborhood, some bright planner decided that sweetgum trees would be the ideal replacement for the now demised maple and/or elm trees that used to line our block. Well, sweetgums grow pretty fast, and by 2008 the two in front of our house had managed to push sections of the sidewalk 6-8 inches up above grade, at which point the city sidewalk inspector cheerfully condemned the entire sidewalk and gave us a month to fix it before sending in the city crews (at an estimated cost of US$5100.)
We don’t have that sort of money sitting around any more (retiring from computer programming is good for my mental and physical health, but, funnily, it’s not quite so good for our bank account,) so we decided we’d replace the goddamn sidewalk ourselves.
The first step was to go out with a 140 cm wrecking bar and a 25 pound granite boulder, so I could pry up slabs and then hurl, with great force, the boulder onto them. There’s no rebar in this sidewalk, so the concrete needed very little encouragement to revert into an unorganized pile of pebble and portland cement rubble.
The next step (after finishing the demolition of the other root-encouraged slab (directly behind you in these pictures)) is to call the city root inspector to find out whether I can cut the multiple 30cm roots that snake under where the sidewalk used to be, then, after the inspector says “no, you can’t damage a rare and exotic sweetgum!”, order 3-4 cubic yards of ballast and raise the trackbed up to the point where I can put concrete bricks down and have a sidewalk that actually lets the water flow through it instead of making large puddles that don’t actually reach the tree roots.
But that’s a story for another day, thank goodness.