re-designing the porch stairs

The bridge project includes the re-paving of the road in front of our home. The crews have already ripped it up numerous times to insert new water, sewer, and gas lines. This involved the digging of large holes and many truckloads of gravel being deposited in the wee hours of the morning.

Anyway.

The road crew set the level of the new road last week. Much to our dismay, it is quite a bit higher than we imagined. Mind you, we are grateful for the new road, new sidewalks, and all the other new stuff coming our way. But our old stone home is situated one froggy-leap away from traffic, and now that traffic will be higher than the bottom step of our porch, things get complicated.

What to do, what to do?

Soon there will be no reason to walk to the bottom of the stairs and enter the road. The new sidewalk will be installed on the other side of the road -and a tall curb will separate our stairs from moving traffic. No shoulder here!

The stone wall and stairway are original to the house and we are reluctant to mess with them.

Nevertheless, if the last set of stairs will be rendered useless, the wall and steps could be re-designed and re-purposed.

We are exploring the possibility of extending the wall on the right and continuing the landing to lead into our side yard. This would give us easy access to the proposed vegetable gardens. Hopefully, we can re-use the original stone and wooden banisters.

If we make the plan ahead of time, perhaps the road crew could lend us a hand with their equipment. You never know!