Backyard project Day 1

A little background...

We bought our house in 2001. I promised my wife I would buy her a home before she turned 30 and I sqeaked in with about 3 months to spare.

We found a killer house at a killer bargain. 1850 sq. ft. 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. 2 car garage and it was fully landscaped.

A few things about the house drive me crazy. First off, since the houses are in a new subdivision they are close together. Nothing I can do about that fact. 2 things I can fix though are being done right now. Backyard patio and some tiling in the house. Who is the idiot that puts carpet in a bathroom? I digress though...

This is what the backyard patio looked like before I started...

The pad that was in the back yard was 8 x 8. And it was a mighty fine pad don't get me wrong. It just wasn't doing what we needed it to do. Here are a few more pictures to show you why....

Here is the house looking to the right. And now here is the house looking to the left side...

The problem that I had was that it.... A: Looked really bad, and B: limited what we could do when we had people over.

After measuring I decided by taking the pad out and puting something else in we would go from 8 x 8 to 13 x 13. Alot better if you asked me. I don't like the look of concrete though, so we (when I say "we" I really mean that I am going to be doing the labor but my wife is going to support me with cups of water) are going to be putting in a paver stone patio.

Not being one to wait I started to remove some of the cement with the help of one of my young ones....



And my little helper...



We did alright but it took us 1 1/2 hours to get to this point. Not too bad for a first days work and the help of an 8 year old...

So, at the end of day one we were a little sore and had a few blisters that showed up, but other than that a fine day indeed...

Tick