Our New-Old Garden Path or Another Artist's Day Job

My husband and I finally budgeted for a decent  walkway leading up to our front door. As you can see from the 2014 photo to left, the cement path is a jarring, ugly contrast to our old home.
We hired a Connecticut mason, 'Jason the Mason' the kind of contractor that works with his own two hands to dig up the brownstone 'patio' in back that's overgrown with grass, weeds and moss and transfer all said stones to the front yard.

 We were surprised to see how thick some of the stones were, and Jason hauled each one in his wheelbarrow to the front. He asked us if we wanted a straight path or a cobblestone path, we opted for Cobblestone. Yesterday he smashed up the cement, hauled it away, and returned to pour crushed stone into the walkway. He asked if we wanted to just plunk the brownstone on top of the dirt then mow–when needed– over the path when grass grew in. Due to the amount of weeds seeping through the cement, we requested crushed stone. This doesn't mean the most tenacious of weeds won't rear their ugly head, but it'll be better than not having the crushed stone shield.

In unearthing the brownstone in back a curious metal object surfaced. A solemn but hopeful discussion centered around this object questioning if it were something of value. I once unearthed something in the front of our yard and wrote about it in a post here. Further inspection

determined the object was the remains of an old rusty bucket–(damn!)–and there it shall remain for posterity.

Jason is also an artist by trade, we found him through our landscaper who is also an artist. Our landscaper's wife met Jason when she lived at Artspace
a dwelling for artists in downtown Hartford.

When hiring your contractor, please keep this in mind as most artists contrary to the 'ivory tower' stereotype, are very hard workers.

Here is Jason's work: jasonwernerart