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Rock On At The Neighbor’s

In the last couple of years, we’ve really been working hard renovating the inside of our home.  Which left us with a TON of projects and to-do’s left to tackle on the outside of our home.  And the rarely photographed front yard was no exception.  Other than fixing some peeling paint, attaching lattice to the bottom of the porch, and planting a couple of hydrangeas in front of the porch, we haven’t really tackled anything.  But I have a reason for that…a legitimate reason…and it’s not shear laziness, although that’s totally a legitimate reason.  No, it’s because of a little old piece of granite.

Granite Piece In Our Front Walkway

Yes, I am 100% blaming our lack of front yard landscaping on a rock.  That’s just how I roll.  And because it wouldn’t be a quality, Angie-style blog post without a little back story, here’s the story about the granite that’s in the middle of our front walkway.  And yes, we call that broken up, grassy monstrosity of a mess a front walkway.  Our poor mailman.  Or poor Colby who has to mow the walkway every week.

Granite Piece In Our Front Walkway

A couple of years ago, just weeks after we paid a ridiculous sum of money to dig up our street to replace our sewer pipe, the city of Brewer decided to tear up the road and sidewalks to repave them.  When they did that, they dug up the very large and heavy piece of granite that was embedded at the end of our walkway.  A number of our neighbors also had a piece of granite like ours at the end of their walkways but no one else had theirs dug up.  Just us.  Apparently we’re targets for granite digging shenanigans.  So they dug up the granite, repaved the road, repaved the sidewalk, and left the giant rock IN THE MIDDLE OF OUR LAWN!  Seriously!  Five angry phone calls to the City of Brewer, all of which they either denied digging up our walk or said they would send someone “right over” to fix it, the rock never got replaced.  Somehow, Colby and I managed to drag it over (quite painfully) from the middle of our lawn and onto the end of the walkway.  We joked about hitching Goose up to it to see if he had enough pent up energy to move the rock that easily weighed 7 times Goose’s weight (a total of 350 lbs).  We didn’t know what to do with the rock…we couldn’t move it, didn’t know how to fix it, and just wanted it gone.  We even debated putting a “FREE” sign on it, aiming a video camera at it, and watching all kinds of crazies try to take the granite because after all, it’s free.  So a couple years go by and we decide we need to do something about this granite piece.  We want to start working on the front yard….prettying it up, building a brick walkway, replacing the stairs, and performing some general landscaping.  But the rock had to go.  So this guy showed up at our house on Sunday.

Granite Removal Truck

For you locals out there, that’s Jay who owns Clifton Holes and Poles and he is phenomenal!  Here’s where our story gets even crazier.  We didn’t call the guy.  This is one of those I know a guy who knows a guy situations.  One random evening we were talking to our neighbors up the street (for the record…we have some really cool neighbors…so cool that we willingly get together periodically to discuss the neighborhood goings on over adult beverages…our get togethers may also include fire).  They were asking what was going on with the granite, we confessed wanting to get rid of it, they offered to take it.  Our response…if you can move it, it’s yours!  Turns out our neighbors know a guy with a crane who also happens to run a tree trimming and hole digging business.  Doesn’t everyone know a guy with a crane?!  Those are our neighbors in the background and their house is the white one two white houses up from us (one of the reasons I’m jonesing to paint our house gray…no more trio of white houses).

Granite Removal

Out came the pick poles, stakes for levers, and polyester slings.

Granite Removal

And before we knew it, the rock was airborne.  And it didn’t even have to go through military training to go airborne.

Granite Removal

Into the back of the truck and up to the neighbors’ house the granite slab went where they did something really cool with the it.  While Jay was there, they had him dig a decent sized hole in the middle of their flower garden with that ginormous auger on the back of his truck.  Then, using the crane, he placed the granite into the hole lengthwise, so the end of the granite was sticking up out of the dirt a few feet.  It looks so cool and I’m kind of jealous they thought of it first and now they have our granite.  Good thing that sucker weighs so much or I might have resorted to granite thievery in the middle of the night.

Anyway…I’m super stoked that the granite is gone and I’m already starting to scheme up ideas for the front of the house.  I’m trying not to go too crazy (like paint the entire house…although I really want to) since we have so many other projects already in the works.  But we’ll see.  I usually pick my next project based on my level of frustration with something going on at our house.  So if the walkway annoys me enough, it will inevitably end up gone.

Pssst…Who do you know with a crane?  Or a big truck?!

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Angie's Roost Campbell Family in front of home in 2021

Hi there! We're the Campbells. We traded in Maine city living for the country life in Vermont. You'll find us here fixing up a circa 1781 historic home, growing our own food, and filling this home with the memories and things that matter. Read more about us...

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