belated pics of new driveway

It's been a while since we've had the new driveway, but I know that I never posted pictures of it finished. It so much nicer than the old driveway. There's no scraping the cars, and it looks much better. (the scraggly bushes you see in the yard are gone now, and the yard/weeds are cleaned up). Luckily, our drive is next to a fire hydrant (you can see the yellow paint in the second picture), or else the city would have made us expand the apron, which would have cost a couple thousand extra.

So the drive looks great, but we're still really unhappy about all the sand and rubble the contractors dumped in our back yard. And they didn't do a great job about grading the yard, which they said they would, and the driveway is actually a bit higher than the ground in the back instead of level, and it's almost level with the basement windows. So they didn't dig the drive low enough. Overall, not too impressed with their work, but it's still an improvement over the old drive.

New Roof

As a reminder from our first post, here is a picture of the house when we bought it:


And here the house with a new roof:

You can also see how much cleaner the house looks with all the debris (trees, fence, etc) removed. I really like this picture of the house.

We went with the same company we saw do a roof down the street, American Home Contractors. We got charcoal color shingles, regular style. I like the darker color that matches with the occasional dark brick in the house. The shade from the trees will keep it from getting too hot, along with the vent along the top of the house. The dark color also keeps it from looking dirty and stained after a few months. Looking at it now, I kind of wish we had gotten the architectural shingles, but ah well. Along with the roof, they replaced the gutters and trim under the gutters. They replaced the basement windows, too, but I don't have any good before-and-after pictures of those.

I think it looks so much better!