Since moving into our old house in 2007, there have been some debates between El Franco and me over the state of the flagstones in the small front yard. I maintained that they were in good condition and that we didn’t need to remove them, whereas El Franco hated the relatively new yellow stone flags that were there when we moved in. He always thought they didn’t complement or match the style of our Victorian row house.
It just so happened that our neighbours were having their own front yard renovated and they had to remove some older, irregular-shaped flagstones, which they were going to have thrown out. We asked if we could have them instead, and they eventually took up the old stones and put them in our yard where they had been piled up for a week or two.
This Good Friday, El Franco decided to go outside and “just prepare the yard” by at least removing the yellow flagstones that were already there, in anticipation of laying the older-looking stones at some point in the near future.
Never one to see another work hard while standing by doing nothing, I opted to help out by demolishing the small walled-in flower bed by the fence. Eventually, one thing led to another and it ended up that we both just rolled up our sleeves and got stuck in, removing the flagstones completely and replacing them with the better looking ones the neighbours had given us.
It also turned into quite the local community affair, as other neighbours asked if they could have the flagstones we’d just taken up, for their own use, to which we readily agreed so we wouldn’t have to get rid of them ourselves. Some neighbours farther down the street had a few similar stones to the ones we were laying, so we got this whole production line going and carried them over to our yard.
I have to say, I think El Franco was right all along in wanting to replace those yellow flagstones; I think the end result is far nicer and much more in keeping with the older feel of our home (before and after photos below). We even left a patch of earth so we could create a herb garden, right by the front door. Well, okay, the patch of earth was left there partly because we’d run out of stones to lay at that point, and also because we had to do something with the soil from the small flower bed, but still; it looked good and we were happy with the result!
