Well, today was an interesting day.
Five, count 'em, guys showed up today. It started off bizarre when one of the guys complained about missing bricks from the pallet. I thought that they had been stolen and joked that it was probably the crew down the street because they seemed to be using the same bricks (manufacturer, style and colour) as we were using. Then Arlene chimes in and says they came down on Saturday and told her that they'd talked to our guys and were told it was OK to use some of ours if they were short. Lies! So they took a dozen bricks and finished their job leaving us short for today.
I left a message on their cell phone telling them that I wasn't impressed with their business practices and I didn't appreciate being lied to. I told them to replace the bricks today. At 5 PM, they still hadn't called or showed up so I left a message at their office saying they if we didn't get the bricks back then they had two choices. We were going to go down to our neighbours and pull up the bricks and leave them to explain that to their customer or I'd simply call the police and report a theft. That got them to call back and they promised to have bricks replaced at 8:00 AM tomorrow. We'll see.
A huge truck load of top soil was delivered today, and it still wasn't enough to fill the area since they'd excavated so deep. We're going to have 8 to 10 inches of topsoil now instead of the sand and rocks we had before. Because an additional step was added to the front compared to the drawings, the dimensions were now off for the placement of the flower beds. A lot of time was spent figuring out how to maintain the symmetry and still get everything planted. Finally, the owner was called to settle things. We wound up moving our lilac bush a few feet.
Because they're so late on the project, and we leave for Halifax on Thursday morning, we decided not to plant the shrubs until we get back. That way our neighbours don't have as much to worry about while we're away. The sod will be laid and the tree planted.
It poured rain late in the afternoon so they couldn't finish spreading the topsoil. They were delayed about an hour when the bobcat broke down. These pictures were taken on July 9th.
The cedars were ripped out so we could do the brickwork for the arbour. We were told that someone would be out tomorrow to build it.
We had patio stones laid on the side of the house instead of fancy brickwork because it's a lot cheaper and visitors don't really see it. These stones replace the pure river stone that was there before. I had a heck of a time pushing the lawn mower through that stuff so I wanted the patio stones with just a border of river stone.