One of my favorite facts about the patio is that we weren't even planning on doing it when my parents showed up in late June. In fact, it was supposed to be the fence that would be going up. Upon my mother's first look at the backyard, however, she declared that we really should be doing a patio as well. Here's a pretty before picture so you all can agree with her.
Before digging up anything we had to weed the entire area. What a pain.
Dwight was a very good supervisor.
Weed, weed, weed.
Looks good, right? Yeah, I know. Their are so many things wrong in the above picture. Only half of which is now corrected. The other half is yet to come.
After the weeding, the boys got busy digging out all the gravel and the dirt so we were six inches deep.
Mr. Mean Mug.
We ordered a dump truck to bring in gravel to fill the first four inches and sand to fill the top two inches.
Gravel done.
Papa John compacted while Chris drove to get more bricks.
Funny side note, when Chris first moved to Utah and started the landscaping, his friend Brandon was with him and helped unload a few thousand pounds of bricks as well. Just an FYI to any of Chris' friends who come visit, you may end up hauling a lot of stone.
Dwight was still supervising on Day 3. Hard worker, that one.
If you happened to notice that brand spanking new wheelbarrow was different from the last Dwight shade structure, then you get an A+. Papa John decided to throw a giant rock into the first one and it just so happened to fall right through the bottom of the tray. Whoops! It was quite a trip getting the new one home too. Who would have thought that it would take a half hour for the store employee to find tools at Lowe's to take it apart so it would fit in the car? Craziness.
Our ever growing pile of pavers.
Once we were finished unloading everything, Chris and Alex got cleaned up and I took them to the airport to go New Orleans for their friend, Jake's, bachelor party. Lucky brats.
The next day we got started on the paver laying. It was a little slow going at first until we got a nice process down. Mama Karen did paver picking, cleaning and organizing so we would use an equal amount of all the various shapes. I was the designer/layer-outer person. And Papa John was the hammer-downer person. I think the rubber mallet in the garage has officially taken first place as the cheapest, yet most used tool in there. That baby got a work out!
Here is progress after the first paver day.
A few more days of paver placement ensued in the hot, summer sun. Next we rented a brick cutter so we could make the edges of the patio flow with the shape of the retaining wall and the grass circle (where we will eventually have a fire pit...gas line already all hooked up). I think this was the extra step that really makes the patio look awesome.
After waiting a few days for our Amazon edging to arrive (we found out after the fact that Home Depot DID carry it, the employee I asked apparently just wanted us to suffer two agonizing days of no work), we finally got it in place.
Last step was to take some paver set polymeric sand and brush it with brooms in between all the cracks. Five buckets later we hosed it down to set it in place. Four rounds of hosing later we had a finished patio!
Here is the first magnificent addition to our backyard.
SO AWESOME!
Three days later I was able to put the table and chairs back on it.
Yes, those may be fence posts you see in the background...
And below is a sneak peek for another project that I'm currently working on. I'll give you one guess.
Chris and I absolutely LOVE having our patio done. So nice not tracking in all that gravel anymore.
Next spring/summer we are going to tackle one tiny addition to it to make it a little more fluid with the rest of the curved yard by extending it just to the other side of the air conditioning unit and curving it around the grass a bit more.
Slowly, but surely, this yard is coming along!
