Each of these work crews has the challenge of the greenway. They can't drive to the houses because there is no road -- our emergency access is a grassy open area that is easily damaged when it is wet. The dumpster for Jack's project is parked as close as possible to his house, in the parking lot. Not very close. During the day, there are about six work vehicles jockeying for position at the top of the greenway. My neighbors are extremely sensitive about ruts and mud, and almost all deliveries are done with a cart. After fifteen years, it feels normal to load up a little wagon and tow groceries from the car down the hill to the front door (that may be the biggest deterrent to people who are thinking of living here -- it is not the suburban model that most people expect). The UPS guys leave their trucks running in the parking lot and run the packages through the neighborhood. Only an ambulance or fire truck is allowed to drive through the whole place, and only then would the neighbors fix the ruts without a comment.
Which means that winter is not usually the time when home improvement projects happen. In the summer, the greenway is usually solid and trucks can go through without leaving a mark.
The walkway crew had planned to start at our house, the top of the hill, and work their way down, always driving the truck downhill so the damage would be minimized. They have a little rented backhoe, a flat bed truck to remove the dirt and asphalt, a rented bobcat for bringing in the gravel and the pallets of brick, and a few noisy tools that run on small gasoline engines. There are two manager types (white men who speak English) who run the rented equipment and three laborers (brown men who speak Spanish) who do the skilled work by hand. The whole project was predicted to take about three weeks, weather permitting.
Ha. Starting a project in late December will make this an uphill battle and I predict that the walkways will not be finished before early March if they are lucky. They have already changed the plan because it has been raining for about a week and the greenway is impassable. So instead of finishing our walkway and heading down the hill, they reversed direction and headed toward the Common House, staying on pavement.
On the days that it wasn't raining much, or only raining a little, they stayed and worked until well after dark. They were here on Christmas Eve until 6:00. They don't get paid unless they are working.
I am mesmerized by the process, and I can see it from half the windows in our house. I still haven't quite figured out how they do it -- I understand everything up to the part where they cut the bricks to make the herringbone pattern. After the backhoe has removed all the asphalt and the gravel is dumped in, one guy makes it perfectly smooth and level. It is a painstaking process with strings and pieces of conduit to make sure the brick will be at exactly the right level. One guy, who has a steady hand and a strong back, cuts each brick for the edge row. One guy, completely confident in his experience, lays the brick and bonks it in gently with a soft mallet. The last two have to work very closely together because it is a handmade process, and the cutter can't get ahead of the bricklayer.
There is a thick cloud of grey dust and the constant sound of sawing bricks. It's a good thing the results are so beautiful. I am sure that the people who live in the middle will be quite tired of the constant presence of all this racket and disruption by the end of winter. I am sure there will be lots of email commentary. I am glad they started up here so our turn with the noise and dust will be over soon. And I now completely understand why this process is costing about $80,000. Now I don't see how the landscaping company could be making a profit on this, but what do I know about the cost of renting equipment or how much a bricklayer gets paid.
Anyway, Christmas was blessedly quiet here. No leaf blower, no saw, no backhoe, no bobcat, no beeping backing up trucks, no UPS deliveries. It's not what most people appreciated about Christmas, but it was enough for me.
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