(soft music) - [Jason] It's a new day in the game of life, but with plenty of reminders of days gone by.

(soft music) - [Radio Host] For the very latest on the hornets, Kyle Bailey's got you covered.

- I'm not an artist.

Everybody says, "Oh, the artist.

"Oh."

No.

No, I just like to paint.

(soft music) I can be out here all the time.

I just lose myself in it.

- [Jason] The hours he spends out here are immeasurable.

Every day, day into night.

(upbeat music) - I was painting all through the night last summer.

I would paint all night long from 8:00 PM till 6:00 AM.

I'd watch the sun come up and I'd be out here painting.

- He's out here pretty much all the time.

14, 15 hours a day.

(upbeat music) - It's painstaking effort.

I mean, I see him up here at six o'clock in the morning up until nine o'clock at night.

He's laying down, he's got his mat out, he's got his paint brushes out, and he's painting away.

(upbeat music) - [Jason] The funny thing is, this whole thing began by accident when one day a few years ago, he dropped a jar of paint.

- I dropped it and it started spilling all over the place.

And I went and got a paint brush, and I started spreading it out so it wouldn't cover too much of the driveway.

It started looking like a circle.

And I said, well, let's go ahead and make it a circle.

- [Jason] And just like that, a new passion project was born.

- One day he just started painting, and I thought, what is that?

What is he doing?

- [Jason] Some of the neighbors came by and we would ask questions about what they thought about the whole project.

And some people, you know, figured that he'd eventually give up on it.

- [Jason] But it's not until you take a step back, or in this case, up, do you realize the full scale of what Jim Celania is doing in the canvas he's working on.

(upbeat music) - After I got to looking at it, I'm saying, maybe he's got something going here.

This is pretty interesting.

- He loves to be out here.

This is his passion.

(upbeat music) - [Jason] Some of you may recognize his voice.

- There's no more pre-season- - [Jason] Or his face.

- Yes, I was the youngest sports director in America.

- [Jason] A sports broadcasting career that took him coast to coast.

- [Jim] Came to Louisville, Louisville to San Francisco.

- [Jason] Eventually landing him in Charlotte in the eighties.

- I'm Jim Celania, and I'll be above the action today here at the Charlotte Motor Speedway.

When I got here, when I bought this house, I knew I was home.

- [Jason] Television then gave way to radio.

- [Jim] I got a call from Sports Talk Radio here.

Lo and behold, I had a second career.

- [Jason] For 20 years hosting shows on WFNZ.

Finally retiring from all things broadcasting in 2018.

His early fifties Cotswold Ranch sits just as he bought it, but now in the middle of tear downs and new construction.

- When I moved on this street, there were no kids.

And now I think just about every house has kids.

And most of the homes were like mine, a ranch.

Now it's 4,000 feet straight up in the ground.

So it's become a street of mansions.

- [Jason] For years, Jim hardly knew any of his neighbors.

He was the quiet guy on the street.

- Jim kind of kept to himself for a while, and I always thought, "Who's the man who lives in that house?"

- [Jason] But that all changed thanks to two things, his new puppy Jack and his newly found passion for painting.

- [Jim] Once they started seeing Jack, they wanted to come up to see him, and that's when they first saw the driveway 'cause you can't see it from the road.

- Every time we're walking by with my daughter, with my kids, I mean, he'll wave us on up, he'll hand a paint brush to my daughter, and he'll sit there and teach her how to paint.

- I got credibility and likability now because of a dog and a driveway.

(Jim laughs) - [Jason] Jim's driveway painting began with simple circles.

- [Jim] The big circles are a bicycle tire.

The smaller circles are plates from the kitchen - [Jason] Then came flags.

- [Jim] First one I did was Ukraine.

I got 28 country flags over there.

- [Jason] Then slogans and signs.

♪ Sign, sign, everywhere a sign ♪ - I start branching out with slogans and commercial things and stuff like that.

♪ Do this, don't do that ♪ Can you read the signs - [Jason] And of course there's plenty of sports references from Grand Slam to goal and touchdown.

- And now the kids in the neighborhood wanna see their name in the lights, you know?

So there's little girls' names all over the driveway.

- This is just one of my favorite things of the neighborhood.

- [Jason] And he's even gotten creative with the cracks in his driveway, turning them into little rivers.

- So I put the gold paint around the cracks.

And then I said, well, the cracks should have something in them.

And I got this white gravel.

I just used a hammer, a chisel and beat 'em down in there.

I paint 'em aquamarine blue.

- This is an incredible amount of work he's put into this thing.

- [Jason] The amount of paint he's used to do all this.

- I got a bag in there that's just full of empties.

I probably spent five to $8,000.

(soft music) - [Jason] Perhaps the biggest thing to come out of Jim's driveway art is his neighbors now all know who he is.

- Jim, the most interesting man in the neighborhood.

- If they ever were afraid of me, they no longer are.

- I feel like he's the mascot of our neighborhood.

- [Jason] The driveway's gotten so much attention that some people have mistaken it for a daycare.

- Someone even asked me if there was a daycare coming up on the street.

- And we like to joke that Jim runs the neighborhood preschool.

- [Jason] As for the future, Jim's already made plans for the house as well as the driveway.

He's gonna give it all away.

But with one little catch.

- This house ain't going nowhere and nor is the driveway.

- [Jason] So whoever comes in next has to take it as is.

- And this is kind of a permanent footprint that will stay that people can enjoy for years.

And I think he really likes to make people smile.

- And I think it's meant a lot to him that he's gone on this journey.

- My life has changed.

This driveway has changed my life because- - [Jason] The once quiet guy with an interesting past now bringing an entire neighborhood closer together.

For "Caroline Impact," I'm Jason Terzis reporting.