Surprise home projects

I hadn’t planned to have any work done on the house this weekend—it’s been kind of a long week. But opportunity knocked—in the form of a paving contractor.

One of the things I haven’t liked about our house since we moved in is our road. Our neighbors are fine—it’s the actual pavement that is problematic. Like a lot of people in Arlington, we live on a private road—what this means is that the city doesn’t do anything about paving, sidewalks, or storm sewers, and we get a break on rules about things like on-street parking. It’s not a great trade-off if you have a driveway, like me. The biggest issue we have is that the last time the neighborhood association had the street paved, they left an unpaved triangular strip, about a foot wide at the widest, where our property line angles away from the street. It picks up road sand and salt, grows weeds, and generally annoys us. Add to that—the pavement that was there wasn’t level, and we generally had a big puddle in front of our house after a rainstorm. But I didn’t really figure on doing anything about it.

Until the paving contractor showed up to do our neighbor’s driveway—acting quickly, professionally, with a crew of about eight guys, they had the work well in hand before 9:30 in the morning. I knew they would be working on our next-door-neighbor’s curb, so I asked the foreman for a quote.

Before noon, the crew had laid in new asphalt right up to the curb, level from one end of the property to another, with no place for a puddle to form and no room for mud. Plus they fixed a huge crack in our sidewalk for free.