Trying to add a payment method? You can do this on the 
Whenever you embark on a column about a home improvement project gone wrong, it’s always good to mention similar failures upfront. Realizing you’ve done worse, I believe, sets readers at ease.
So, this column’s debacle isn’t as bad as the time I paid $140 after trying to replace a light bulb (new light fixture), got a coat hanger and a bicycle chain stuck in a clogged drain pipe (trying to unplug said pipe) and set myself on fire while trying to replace a microwave oven (while on my back atop our stove, accidentally turned on an element with my knee).
Today’s edition is about restoring a rock walkway leading to our front porch. Simple, huh? Benign. What could go wrong?
In June 2018, we had our front yard redone by a landscaping company. To save money, Sally and I took on the challenge of putting in a rock walkway to our front porch: about 125 pieces of Molalla Easy Stack Wall Rock from Lane Forest Products.
It was a week-long project — physically taxing and expensive, but satisfying. The results looked good. Between the rocks, we put in “creeping thyme,” or, scientifically, “Thymus Serpyllum,” or practically speaking, the little blue flowers that took over our adjacent lawn with all the temerity of the Texas killer bees in the 1978 movie, “The Swarm.”
Years later, we spent a week digging out the stuff and replacing it with grass. We thought grass would give the rock walkway a nice visual tie-in to the lawn — and return the lawn from blue to green. Sort of the English garden look.
What we didn’t think was that, over the years, the grass would take over the rocks. But before we knew it, the rock had been obscured by matted-down grass that, in places, had a thicket of dirt and roots that plunged three inches in places. Instead of a rock walkway accented with grass, we had a grass walkway with rocks appearing like bit players in a musical.
Thus, the decision this spring to replace the grass with something recommended by our landscaper: PolySweep, a joint stabilizer that looks like sand but, when wet, hardens almost like concrete.
“It’ll keep the weeds out,” our landscaper told me.
Perfect.
But the challenge of digging out grass that, for years, had been rooted in one- to five-inch ligaments?
Not so perfect.
What I thought would be a one-morning project became a multiday project.
After hours with a flat-blade shovel and a half-moon shovel, I defaulted to my desperate imagination. I took a cordless drill, stuck in an inch-and-a-quarter bit and used it to loosen up the soil between the rocks.
Unlike using a coat hanger and bicycle chain to unclog a pipe, it worked — not that the bit would be effective on wood anymore. But in home improvement, as in checkers, sometimes you must give up one checker to win two.
She Who Should Have Married a Rich Man joined me on the front lines. I drilled. She dug out the pelts of grass and roots, most of which resisted like teenagers asked to attend a family brunch.
By mid-afternoon, we were so sore we had to curb our grunts and groans, lest the walkers and joggers call 911.
Finally, we had cleaned out the grass around all 100-plus flat rocks. I went to Lane Forest Products and asked for PolySweep. A guy had me estimate the square footage, then recommended two or three bags.
I bought five. History suggests I seldom err on the too-much side; I err on the not-enough side.
“You can always bring them back if you don’t use them,” he said, something I wasn’t looking forward to, given that they weigh 50 pounds each and I’m 72 years old.
At $35.99 each, they weren’t cheap either. But, hey, for $180 and a good amount of sweat equity, we were fixing a problem that had dogged us for almost a decade. My spirits were high.
Until the mix didn’t go as far as I thought it would. I returned for 12 more bags, justifying the expense by recalling how, just days before, I’d been going through my tax receipts and found an uncashed check for $400 from a San Diego friend who’d joined me at the 2025 Rose Bowl against Ohio State. (Given the results of Oregon’s pathetic loss to the Buckeyes, when talking to my pal to assure the check would still be good, I felt a bit like a Titanic purser trying to square up with a passenger while bobbing in a lifeboat.)
But that unexpected $400 paid for two-thirds of the $611.83, so I rationalized the project had cost us only $211.83. Well, that is, until I had to go back for five more and then one more trip for the final five. That brought the total to 27 bags, $971.73, or a Rose Bowl ticket net of $571.73.
Ouch. Far more than the $150 I expected, but, hey, what price can you put on a project whose purpose is to welcome people to your house, right?
“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers,” says Hebrews 13:2, “for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”
Even if we were having a devil of a time getting the thing done. On what I thought would be our last day on the project, I bought the final five sacks. By now, the guy at Lane Forest Products knew me better than some of my closest relatives did.
“A word of caution,” he said. “The forecast today is for rain, and this stuff hardens up in a hurry when it gets wet. We dropped a bag recently and I had a hard time busting it up with the prongs of a forklift.”
Any intruding fear I had was cleared by the bouncer of Welch DNA. “Reason” and “caution” were not our strong suits. “Get ’er done” was. No boat my father built was christened with its paint completely dry.
I rushed home, hacked open the bags with a utility blade, and, with an occasional glance at an increasingly foreboding sky, began the final layer. As if on cue, rain started falling, scattered drops at first (no worries), then car wash thick. (What was I thinking?)
Before I knew it, my beautiful 100-plus rocks were obscured by sand — dry sand that was turning into semi-cement. Half a dozen spray heads of my sprinkler system had gone missing, destined to be stuck shut by the hardening sand.
The walkway was a total mess.
Frantically, I shoveled whatever sand hadn’t been used into a giant plastic tub and dragged it into the garage to stay dry. I located the sprinkler heads and dug them free. I took a battery-operated leaf blower to each rock, which got most of the sand off. However, the process wasn’t strong enough to form a bottom layer of sand that had already melded with the rocks.
I grabbed a garden hose and, with its nozzle, hit each rock. It worked, but also flooded the walkway, turning it into what looked like a cesspool of sandy regret.
How did this happen? This was just the finishing touch. Now the project was careening toward catastrophe.
Ultimately, I won the battle, even if I lost at the cash register. And at the body level. I felt soreness I hadn’t felt since 20-mile days on the Pacific Crest Trail.
A week later, I grabbed the tub of sand in the garage to drag it outside. It wouldn’t budge, having hardened. Trying to move it was like trying to move the Liberty Bell.
I mentally shook my head. It was too heavy to throw in the back of the pickup and take to the dump. Thus, I was resigned to make lemonade out of lemons.
Somewhere in our landscape, it will find a home as a monument to the dangerous odd couple of Welch home-improvement projects: persistence and impatience.
