in the fall i was anxious to re-stain and repair the deck in our back yard.
it was peeling and pretty nasty and warped in some places. our toddler was in constant danger of getting splinters or tripping and falling on her face.
however my husband convinced me to hold off, and said that maybe in the spring we could just tear out and redo the whole deck instead. that deck had seen many happy days, but it was time.
over the next few months our idea of building a new deck morphed/snowballed into building a flagstone patio.
the main reason was that we figured that if we were going to invest time and money, then we might as well make it something that would be low maintenance and that we wouldn't have to redo again in 10 years.
so in february we started demo. i fully anticipated relaxing on my stone patio by the end of the month. at least by march.
everyone helped with demo, and it was disgusting. pics of a cute toddler are much cuter than pics of us at this point. why is dirt only cute on babies?
when we found tons of rat poop and spider eggs underneath the deck, i was more happy than ever that we weren't putting up a deck again. the underside of those things are a magnet for nasty apparently!
we also found that part of the deck was built over a concrete pad. this meant that we would have to lay the flagstone a couple different ways on the concrete vs the ground.
the dogs were confused.
we needed lots of breaks.
the demo alone was a tone of work. then the next step was digging out the area on the ground where we would be laying stone.
by now it was march, and the texas spring weather was not working in our favor. this was just a weekend project for us, and some how every weekend seemed to get rained out.
once we dug out the area we wanted, we then filled it with a couple inches of decomposed granite and rented a tamper to flatten it down.
we thought we were done with the hardest part.
ha!
next we had the stone delivered, pressure washed everything, and then dry laid the stones. it felt like the home stretch.
all that was left using some cement to stick down the stones that were laid on the concrete, and then we'd fill the cracks and seal everything.
however, i forgot that i was married to a perfectionist. sticking down the stones and laying them in the perfect place where they would be perfectly level and perfectly sloping away from the house required hours of measuring, placing, and the pulling up the stones and doing it all over again if it wasn't perfect.
this was our life for a month. if i had been the project manager on this part, i would have just eyeballed it, slapped it down, and call it a day. in the end i'm glad my husband took the time to make things look professional, but at the time i was so over it! notice i forgot to take pics of this step. i think i was too traumatized.
that seemingly simple step of sticking down the stones ended up being the most complicated part of the project, so after that we could actually see the finish line!
we filled all the cracks with concrete sand, and then sealing the stones and cracks.
tadaaaa!
by mid may we were enjoying our patio. yes, i said MAY!!
i never thought that day would come.
i got a steal on some comfy patio furniture via craigslist, and we were ready to finally enjoy this thing!
this definitely took the prize for the most exhausting diy of all time. it was back breaking, and never ending. but worth it? now that we're on the other side of things i think i can say yes. i can also say never again! lol.
we've certainly been living it up in the backyard since we finished!
this patio was also a part of my husband's dream of creating a backyard theater, so we're planning to really make the most of all our hard work!
i thought i would be burned out on doing yard work/diys for the rest of my life after that one, but now i'm actually feeling inspired to tackle some new projects. stay tuned...one of them has to do with that big black thing against our exterior wall.
we'll have lived in this house for 5 years next month, so it feels good to give it a little bit of sprucing up in honor of the occasion. hopefully now this patio will last even longer than this house, because we are so done with this project! :)
