The good (not much), the bad (a lot), and the ugly (too much)

Here's what the lanai (patio for those of you "up north") looks like today.  As you can see, there is a lot to be done just in preparation for the demo and renovation. 

I think just getting rid of all of the "junk" out here will make a tremendous difference.  Some of this has been here for more than a year.

• Junk on the table next to our bedroom doors. The "thing" hanging above the door is a speaker mount; twenty years ago, it was the best (only) choice for outdoor music.  Guess it will have to go in favor of wireless ones.

• Living room doors.  The started and quickly abandoned painting project. Note the spilled paint on the pavers.

• Lots more junk. The ladder has to go.  Our breakfast nook windows.

• Family room sliders and guest bathroom door. The lounge chairs are going out for repainting and restrapping next week.  I did say that this project has really snowballed, didn't I?

• The 16' x 16' pad will be out the door to the left of the grill; we will put the firepit and chairs on it.

• Our neighbor is going to take those planters. Her green thumb will do a fantastic job on them!  The blue "thing" in the pool is the Kreepy Krawly pool cleaner.  It arrived a few weeks ago, and I still panic that there's an alligator in the pool when I catch a glimpse of it.

• The firepit and chairs ... future home of the lounge chairs.

• Our bedroom windows.  More junk to put away or toss.

Picking waterline tile

Our contractor gave us a deadline of July 20 to come up with our top five choices for pool waterline tile.  We have a catalog, but there are so many possibilities.

To make the job a bit easier, we decided to go through the catalog by ourselves and make a list of our top choices. 

Next, we went through our lists to determine if we chose any of the same tiles.  

Here are our choices to be narrowed down:

Catania

Elements

Inaka

Veracruz

Now that that's complete, we will give these choices to our contractor so that he can give us samples to see in the sunlight. Tune in for our final decision!

What is the project?

Six years ago this past week, we received the plans from the landscape architect for our driveway renovation.  Last night, we finally signed a contract.  A lot happened in the interim, including the following:

We couldn't make up our minds, and that took a lot of time.

Hurricane Irma hit in 2017, and our time and energy were tied up in a new roof and new screen enclosure.  That project was not completed until Spring of 2019.

We resurrected the project and returned to trying to find a contractor to do the entire project: landscaping and driveway.  Every time we met with someone new, we would get different suggestions and ideas.  So, we dealt with paralysis by analysis.

In March of 2020, we had a water leak in our kitchen.  Again, almost a year from the leak until the renovations from that disaster were complete.  And, again, time away from our yard and driveway renovation project.

Finally, in December of 2021 we made the decision to go ahead.  We concluded that the biggest problem we were having was trying to do it all, so we switched it to the hardscape version only with plans to do the landscaping after that part was complete.

Like many renovation projects, things began to snowball.  Our initial plan was simply to extend the driveway to make it circular. Our house is on a corner lot, and with several people in the house all driving their own cars we were regularly jockeying cars around; extending it out to the side street made a lot of sense.  Well, just like the mouse in the story If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, one thing after another was added to the project.  The initial project was to change the driveway from concrete to pavers, and since we would have some left over, we thought we could add a small pad on the backside of the house for our firepit. (Yes, people who live in Southwest Florida do enjoy a firepit, especially when the temps drop into the fifties in January!)  As long as we were going to be doing that, we justified redoing the walkway from the front of the house to the back as well.

Fast forward to March of 2022.  Craig was doing research on the internet and found this beautiful porcelain paver. We visited the hardscape.com showroom in Fort Myers and fell in love with the product. There we go again! Another amount of time spent on making that decision, but that was definitely time well spent. I think that the paver part of the project was another stumbling block that we had.

If we were going to go through with adding the porcelain pavers to the driveway and the walkway and the pad we decided that it would make sense to redo the pool deck at the same time.  Who wants a beautiful porcelain paver driveway with a twenty-year-old faded deck? Sure! Let's do the pool deck, too!  

Doing that would require us to pick new waterline tile.  Another set of decisions to make! At least we have a deadline of July 20 to make our choice.  I'll post that information in a future post along with our thought process of how we came to that choice.  

Last night, we met with our hardscape contractor and finalized the contract.  Six long years have gone by, and now we are ready to start construction. First, though, we have to wait for the porcelain pavers to be made and shipped to us.  Then it's on to demolition and reconstruction.  I'm giddy with excitement at the prospect of a finalized project.  

Won't you join us on this journey?