If you could pour your own driveway…

Drove by this house today on the way to the skatepark for a quick session. I know I’ve driven by it more than a handful of times, but this is the first time I noticed it. It looks more fun in person than it does in the pictures. I blurred the house out because I don’t want to give the owners a headache if they don’t already have one, plus the guy came home as I was standing in the street with my camera, blocking his driveway. I will say that it’s near Glenhaven skatepark in Portland.

My house is on a sloped lot. There’s about two and a half feet drop from the sidewalk to where it levels off. I was thinking about building a retaining wall with a little slope or even a tight transition and some of that brick bull nose coping on top. Something that would be totally skateable but not exactly look like the shallow end of a pool. Actually, I considered tile and pool coping at first, but that would just be asking for trouble. I could easily envision repeated 2 am weeknight sessions by roving packs of skaters, my kids being woken up, me having to go to the front door in my underwear to yell “Hey you kids! get off of my sidewalk!” The gap for the sidewalk to my front door would be fun to try and ollie across if you came rolling down the street and onto the driveway. In any case, it’s all on hold now because the big trees in the front yard have roots really close to the side walk, pushing it up in places. I don’t want to take a chance on killing them just to get a few more usable square feet out of the front yard and place to session.

I wonder if this guy ever has to kick skaters off his driveway. Click to enlarge.