Patio Shot... and a Celebrity

I just finished posting the last entry when I was looking at some of the pictures that were taken over the last few weeks while building the patio. This image just kind of interested me..

I guess it is something about the colors of the leather gloves vs the stones, and the unique perspective. Maybe its kinda artistic, or maybe it is because that is how I spent around 15 hours on my knees about at that level.

Oh and here is the one required celebrity photo... yes the Famous T came and provided some assistance. Oh and my Ma and Pa :) Photo is courtesy of the wife.

Heat Wave

So the heat of summer has finally arrived, with 5-6 days now in the mid to upper 90s. Of course this hot spell come right after I have officially finished all the stonework on the patio! It also has been a bit amusing because every time I try to get the shade/gazebo kit started, the sky starts to get black, and ominous thunder storms start to roll in. Maybe I should do this every other day, and help keep the drought out of Omaha! Perhaps this weekend I will be able to get every last detail finished before we have our “We Have Been in the House 1 Year, so its Housewarming Time party.” For those that may be interested, that will most likely be held on July 22nd, (a Friday night for those of you keeping score) and I am positive some sort of grilled meat and barley beverages will be served.

The wife and I have managed to enjoy one nice night out on the patio the other night in spite of the oppressive heat. We lit up one of those new anti mosquito lanterns, and just enjoyed being able to be outside listening to the sounds of our “hood, and watching the lighting bugs flit across the lawn. Its those kind of nights that I truly live for, simple little pleasures that really can make a person happy.

As it is, I had to rebuild a whole section of the patio, as we had 9 inches of rain before I was able to get the wall completely backfilled, and the locking sand (really cool stuff treated with a polymer that makes the sand almost set up like flexible concrete/rubber)layered between the bricks. It was one heck of a storm, and it washed some of the sand out thru the retaining wall, and caused some of the retaining wall to collapse. Some of the patio paver stones also started to sink as the sand beneath them washed away as well. The patio kind of felt rickety, which on a stone patio is decidedly a bad thing. Thankfully my old man decided to help out again, and he and I put in a gargantuan effort, and rebuilt and straightened 3 of the walls. We also went ahead and releveled a section of the patio that had sunk, and tightened up the gaps in between the 2 stones.

One interesting point I have learned from this project, is that paver stones should have the lumber rule applied to them, as the stones were not 16 inches x 16 inches as advertised, but rather 15.75 x 15.75 inches. This was confusing, as I had originally planned for 16x16 stones and based my measurements for the retaining walls/border off of that ideal size (the stones in the store display are 16x16, but not on the pallet that was delivered to my house… strange.) Obviously, once you start laying the paver stones, you realize that there is a bit of a gap at the end of each row of pavers that needs to be filled. Thankfully we were able to come up with a solution using smaller paver stones to fill the gaps, and the wife and my mother were able to take another tip to the home improvement superextravaganzamart and find the right size stones to fill the gap. The use of the smaller stones really ends up making a nice pattern in the patio, and I am actually happy with the way it now appears.

I also do plan on trying to get this blog updated more often, and with more then just boring stuff like me prattling on about my patio.
Enjoy!

Where does the time fly? - The Patio Part Deux

Okay, another whole week has rolled by, and I think I blinked and somehow missed all the free time I had to blog. Okay, well maybe I was just lazy, and enjoyed lounging in front of the TV a bit too much. All that aside, I once again return to continue my tale of the patio from hell…

So the wife and I had returned home feeling the satisfaction of knowing that we were finally started on the project. I unload the bags of sand and head out to the area where we planned on setting up the patio. I started to scout out the locations in the back yard, and decided on an anchor point where the whole patio measurements would be based from. I marked out the distances with stakes, and felt that despite my not paying to much attention in my engineering notation classes (where we discussed surveying and staking) I had done a fairly good job of getting the measurements correct, and the lines square. This was a pretty good days work, and it was time for me to head to softball, so I decided to call it a day and finish up the next day.

Of course softball provided some wonderful complications, seeing how I managed to completely rip my big toenail off, and drive part of the nail into the top part of the skin that is under your toenail. I love beer league church softball! As you can imagine, this is a quite painful little injury, and I can now completely understand how college and pro athletes can be forced to miss games due to having turf toe. Ouch. It just plain hurt to walk, and now I was going to be undertaking a major construction project in my backyard the next day! I have linked a few pictures below, warning they are kind gross. The wife would also like to let all my readers know that she is completely opposed to any pictures of my toe being posted, and thinks that as a result of me posting this I have become a crude and disgusting boy! Personally I would like to use this as a bit of a social experiment, because I have always noticed that if you post something and say “ah it is so gross and horrible… my eyes are burning” that people will still click on it. The curiosity just can’t be overcome…. So remember I am watching!

Toe 1

Toe 2

Toe 3

I get home and clean my toe up (the wife would have helped, but she has problems touching her own feet, much less my mangled one!) and basically sit there dreading the fact that the next day I am going to spend the whole day on my feet, and then come home and start breaking round and digging thru our amazingly thick and hard sod/clay mixture. The pictures I posted earlier don’t really do the sod justice, but I am proud to say that my lawn had some great root structure (Pebble Beach groundskeeper better watch his back!) I managed to limp my way through a whole day of work (thank goodness for sandals and a very understanding office staff) and come home to start digging. The wife decides that she is wants to do the ceremonial first ground breaking, so she takes the shovel and tries to dig into the ground. All she manages to do is to almost fall over as the shovel completely fails to cut through the sod. I claim this is because she just doesn’t have enough weight behind it, but the wife just rolls her eyes at me and gives me one of those looks that she is now becoming a quasi -internet celebrity for.

What the wife failed to realize is that not only do we have incredibly thick sod, but we also have very dense clay which had not been watered very recently (I was trying to prevent working in a mud puddle) so the clay had kind of backed into a brick like consistency. I even had to jump on the shovel sometimes to get down to the level we were looking for, and occasionally had to throw my gut into it! Every time I stepped on the shovel, my toe ached, and by the end of the night I was pretty sure my toe was swollen up to the size of a bratwurst. I however gamely plugged away, and managed to get about 16 total square feet cleared down to 6 inches below the sod level before darkness over took us.

The next night I rushed home ready to take delivery of our bricks that were to be arriving, only to find myself in a familiar situation of hurry up and wait. Finally we start checking the paperwork and notice that the delivery date is wrong, and our friendly little home improvement clerk never did manage to get the date correct. We were just about to call and make some poor customer service guy’s night, when I saw the delivery truck drive by on the street behind us. Now this is a common thing, as the road behind us has the same name, only is a “Road” while we live on the “Street”. Unfortunately mapping services like Yahoo Maps and MapQuest can’t handle that distinction so many delivery guys find themselves trying to make a delivery to an alfalfa field. This guy must have finally figured it out and arrived to drop the stones off. He quickly unloads his truck mounted forklift, and proceeds to unload the pallets of stone right in the middle of the driveway! Not only would this make it very difficult to use our driveway, but since both vehicles were in the garage, we would never have gotten out unless we moved the stones. The driver was putting the fork truck back on the delivery truck about the time I managed to get his attention and told him he had to move the pallets. Sometimes I wonder what people are thinking or if there is any brain function whatsoever in guys like that!

Well I think this is long enough for now, I will continue sometime soon.. Oh yeah, T I will only use tasteful picutres, as I know that you are a celebrity now, and would hate to be one of those sleazy tabloid sites that post unflattering shots of celebrities! In the mean time, please enjoy this picture of a rainbow /stormclouds that appeared near our house the other night.

Yes I am a lazy blogger... Deal with it.

Wow...So it has been some 2 weeks since I last blogged. I guess I needed a break, and had to find some source of inspiration that I could wildly espouse about. Thankfully, those 2 weeks have been filled with many interesting and humorous moments, and should provide me with plenty of material for you, my loyal subscribers to read. I also feel like I might step up the content provision and use this blog as a vehicle to share some of my photos with people, and better illustrate my blog entries.

If you recall back to my last entry, I was whining about how Mother Nature and my social schedule had conspired to not allow me to get started on building our patio. The wife and I finally cleared our schedules, and with the Memorial day weekend fast approaching, we decided it was high time we got this patio built. Of course, me being the engineer that I am, I had this brilliant plan in my head about how the patio would look, the materials and amounts needed, and the site picked out. Never mind that all this was in my head, and not on paper, but that is a minor little detail, and those things have a great way of working themselves out (usually by rearing their ugly little heads and biting you square on the ass.) The wife and I load up into the truck and head off to our local home improvement extravaganzamart who happens to be having a landscape and outdoor entertainment sale. The wife and I pick out the paving stones we want, and place them on order to be delivered to our house. This is a bit of a debacle as the friendly clerk is completely mixed up on the current date, and ends up putting the wrong time and date into his form and computer for delivery. Finally we think we have the delivery schedule all straightened out, and the wife and I head out to the lumberyard section to gather some of the other materials needed to complete the patio.

Now here is where my thinking started to go a bit awry. I started to buy bags of sand. Now sand in a bag (50 lbs ß remember this amount) basically covers .5 cubic feet, or 1 square foot 6 inches high. Not thinking I buy a total of ten 50 pound bags of sand to act as a base for the whole patio. Yep, ten measly bags of sand. Somehow in my head this made sense, but looking back, I am sure I was afflicted by some mental illness which clouded any bit of math ability I possess, or for that matter any common sense! The wife and I get the sand loaded into the truck and head off to the house feeling content that we are finally going to get this patio thing started.

To be continued….

This will be a multi-part article as the project consumed nearly a week out of our lives, and there are many areas that will need to be fleshed out in more detail.

Anyway, Here are a few pics to enjoy...

Breaking Ground


Making Progress