I haven’t done a ton to the house this summer, hence the massive lack of updates. But there is one major project that I just finished. My driveway wall has been looking a bit worse for wear – cracks, water/mud stains, a few loose blocks, and lots of chipping and peeling paint. So this summer, I finally tackled it , with lots of parental assistance. First I rented a pressure washer to clean the whole thing thoroughly. It took a couple hours to wash the entire wall, but it was incredibly satisfying to see it get clean. We also took the pressure washer over to my parents’ house and washed their brick pathway, which went from a blackish greenish shade to actually brick-colored. It was highly impressive.

In this photo, the right-hand wall has been washed. The left wall has not.

Then it rained every weekend for three months.

Finally we had a clear weekend, so we had to take off all the loose bricks and reattach them – most of them were loose because of failing mortar, so we chipped off the old mortar and re-laid them with fresh. A few could just be glued back into place, so that was the easier solution in a couple of cases. There’s also one large crack (my wall is very slowly falling over, a process which I hope will take several more years) that we filled with mortar as well, just so the grass and liriope will stop trying to grow through it.

My dad and I are very focused on mortaring.

Then I went on vacation, and it rained some more.

This weekend it was clear! I went around and filled all the hairline cracks with concrete patch. Then it was time to prime – 1.5 gallons of Kilz and 3 hours later, I was thoroughly coated in primer and so was the wall. Today I top coated the entire wall with masonry paint, and called it done. The worst bit was painting near the liriope – evidently all the crickets live in the liriope, and they were certain I was coming to get them, so they’d randomly pop out of the plants to escape me. Except they tended to jump straight towards me, which meant I’d flail backwards, trying to get them off me, and they’d go leaping off somewhere else, only for another cricket to repeat the whole sequence a minute later. But the wall is painted, and it looks pretty awesome, if I do say so myself (and I do, after seeing the “before” shot from pressure-washing!).