Let It Pour, Let It Pour, Let It Pour

What Would Eve Do, Part Four

Let's get the ugly stuff out of the way immediately. I made a commitment, all right. I decided that Eve would try something she'd never experienced in her garden before: colored concrete.

I tried to talk her out of it. "Eve," I argued, "it's not porous, it's not biodegradable. For Adam's sake, it's just not green!" She didn't care; she figured she'd greened up enough of the planet in her day that her own conscience could tolerate a hardscape that came out of a hose.

Like chocolate pudding, the concrete arrived pre-mixed a rich, chocolate brown. This would be the base color, anyway, what would be left after the applied colors on top eventually faded (alas, it comes with the media). We're talking a pour that took place last Friday morning; by evening, it was cured.

photo credit: Ketzel Levine

 

The company I chose to work with was All-American Concrete, indistinguishable by name but wait till you meet its owner, Kip. More to the point, when I met Kip, I was caught off-guard by his shy, quiet, Mayberry-like manner and his unselfconscious but alarming good looks. Having learned in oh! so many ways not to be undone by handsomeness, I also called his three references and all cooed over his work.

When I first talked with Kip, back in late March, I was interested in having a flagstone look in the courtyard, which could sorta kinda be achieved by staining and stamping the concrete. Luckily, I changed my mind and decided to add interest by scoring the concrete into a jumble of rectangular shapes, then using three different earthy colors on top of the brown base. (The stamping could have easily backfired and looked tacky).

A few days before the big pour, Kip showed me a bunch of concrete color samples I'd chosen from a chart. I don't think I picked any of the four above. It's a very hit and miss process, this concrete-coloring stuff, but in looking at all my other hardscape choices, this is the one that got me closest to my goal: tidy, no weeding, nice for walking barefoot, and colors that would marry the orange house and the dark gray fountain.

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

 

Tomorrow's installment of What Would Eve Do: Blow me over, it's g-o-r-g-e-o-u-s. Plus, so much for the 5K budget.

3:46 PM ET | 06-18-2008 | permalink