Le Patio

I mentioned to Dad and Mom that I had projects for July. Lots of projects. I knew I would need help cutting out a dead plum tree and some other brush and I knew that the man with the chainsaw would be Dad. So, I mentioned needing help and he and Mom grilled me for more information on said project, which was the first step of patio construction. Not only did they bring the chainsaw, but they also arrived with: the huge pickup which can carry a full pallet of pavers, hand saw, shovels, extension cords, level, hammers, buckets, T-square, and themselves. I had gained some much needed engineering assistance AND laborers to boot!

This is what we faced:

The weeds and baby trees look innocent enough, but they are a rude bunch, which we were to find out later when the shoveling started. But first we needed to frame in the area and do some measurin' and figurin' and calculatin' of slope. That was a bit comical. Mom and Dad were at either end of a string line and I was in the middle hunched upside down eyeballing a level and hoping to direct them to lift or lower to match a nice centered bubble. I know there are devices made for this, but we had to make do with my cockamamie skills. We got it done and framing began. A side note: holy crap, pressure treated lumber is spendy!

After the frame went in, Dad then figured out how to engineer the screed which would run along at the correct depth, thereby showing us where we needed to dig down and where we needed to fill. This is mom, happily digging away after I had pooped out. By the way, Vanessa's digging fork was a miraculous tool that made this job SO much easier than it would have been. Thanks, V!

Mom finally agreed to take a break. It was 91 degrees at this point. We had the frame dug down and it was time to call it a day!

Extremely early the next morning, the parentals got a load of gravel (those people start the day pretty early, and that's coming from someone who rises at 5:30am to feed the dogs) and we prepared the frame for filling. First we put in some weed barrier that I had the fortune to find on sale a week earlier. Yay, impulse shopping finds!

Then we started the process of filling with gravel and releveling with the screed.I like this picture of the bucket standing guard over the weed barrier.

I don't have a lot of pictures of the gravel going in, because Dad and I were a well-oiled machine with the "haul, pour, level, haul, pour, level" routine. Poor mom was stuck in the back of the pickup shoveling buckets full for us. She does well with that shovel. Here's Dad hosing off the finished gravel.

At this point, we were ready to go get the pavers. A very stern lady with a forklift scared the bejeesus out of me and Dad by hefting a pallet from the highest possible rack of stone products at Home Depot. I guess she knew what she was doing, but I've never taken that little orange barrier fence they put up more seriously. In the end, the pickup was loaded with pavers, retaining wall stones, and a dolly. I don't know how hand-trucks became known as dollies, but I'm glad we had one because we had a LOT of pavers to haul. One hundred twenty six of em, plus the extras on the pallet for the future patio part deux. After getting things stacked up, we called a halt and cleaned up, then went to a Gems game. Yay, baseball!

Bright and early the next morning, we set out to place the pavers. Unfortunately, we had too much gravel. I blame myself for the slope and screed measurements. All that beautiful gravel was pretty much now in the road.

We soon had a system, however. Dad was the "grader" and proceeded to manually remove gravel as mom and I packed and placed each paver. Each paver had to be leveled individually, which sometimes involved a lot of discussion, moving of problematic lumps, and stomping. To those of you wondering about the slope to the right, I live on a hill (which Dad loves to point out and complain about) and I also wanted to retain enough slope in the patio to have runoff go AWAY from the house. It looks more extreme in the picture than it really is, for some reason.

Finally, after getting all 126 pavers in place and then using the gravel to create nicely filled sides, we put in a small retaining wall on the uphill side of the patio. I was happy to have the gravel to fill in and hold the sides and retaining blocks. Here you can see some fisticuffs in action.

In the end, there are a few spots which will have to settle out and may need a bit of "help" in getting tamped in again, but this is the finished product. The dog's kennel will go on the right side, up against the fence and retaining wall, leaving an L-shaped area free. The total dimensions ended up being a 9x14 patio with about a foot of graveled area on each side. I absolutely could not have done this without the help of my parents. They are awesome. I love them, and I love my new patio.

The girls do, too.