Outdoor Living

For the whole month of May we were slaving and sweating in our backyard trying to upgrade our patio. I can not say how excited and relieved that it is finally done. We started this project not knowing how hard and intense it really was. Hence, why it took a month to finish. Thank goodness for my wonderful talented brother who came to rescue you us from our nightmare project.

Ta da! here it is our beautiful patio. It started off with just your standard small boring 6x6 concrete slab. Sorry, no before photo. We extended it the whole length of our house and came out 11 ft. I love it! I can actually come outside and enjoy myself now

My brother even built me a custom fire pit around one of the pergola columns. Isn't it fabulous? I can't wait for winter time to invite people over to make s'mores. Also, if you look in the background my hubby is in the process of building me a fence as well. So many projects to get done before he leaves for deployment. I can't believe it's less than a month away. We sure are going to miss him, but we will definitely enjoy his hard labors he left behind.

This is the most before shot I have. I didn't think about taking a picture until we had already ripped up the previous patio, laid the stone paver border, and filled with dirt. Which, when my brother came to visit he told us we didn't need the dirt we needed a concrete base. What? Now that we shoveled a whole truck load of dirt in, we have to shovel it back out...

I can't complain I got a good arm workout for a month. My arms are looking fabulous. Dad and I split up the work. I lifted, mixed, and dumped 70  80lb bags of concrete. Ooch, you can say I was pretty sore.

As I dumped the concrete Dad spread and smoothed it out. This part was the easy part. Once we started laying the natural flagstone down we quickly realized how out of our league we were. We needed help FAST. Good thing my brother is a very talented man who owns his own stone/landscaping business. I called him up begging and pleading him to come save us from our misery.

Who is this little helper in charge of filling my bucket up with water?

Why its Gabriella! We had to find some way in making this project fun or we would have gone CrAzY.

Yay! My brother came to the rescue. Not only was I happy, but Isabel was happy too, because she got to play with her cousins

Here he is...the Man with the Plan.

Once he came there really wasn't much we could do to help out. We just let him do his thing, but me and Dad did get to help out with some of the grouting.

THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! Ethen you are the BEST! If you hadn't came to help I don't know what we would have done. I do know one thing. Next time we go to do a patio ourselves it will not be with real natural stone. We will opt for the regular old paver stones.  I can deal with simple basic straight lines all symmetrical.