House work! (page 7)

2008 Spring, early Summer Work

My latest is a "lower" patio. After I built my regular patio, I had enough blocks to replace a poorly drained area near my "view gate". First, I laid out some samples to get a feel for the slope and area:


Then, I began to sculpt the ground. Removing some areas, building up others. I decided to try and make the patio as flat as possible, with only a minimal slope for drainage. So that meant a retaining wall along the back and along the fence.




I laid in a "T" shaped drain pipe to pull accumulated water away.


I built the back retaining wall and prepped the base for the step that would be needed.




I cleaned and restained that portion of the fence since parts of it would be covered by the retaining wall.


Then, the weekend of Apr 26, I worked like a mad man. Built the fence retaining wall (twice), caulked down the top rows, laid the string, leveled the ground and began hauling in gravel and sand. Takes quite a while to get everything right. I'm 1/3rd the way done.

I worked today on the patio over lunch. Ran out of blocks :( I've come up with an alternative - 12" square red pavers that I need to buy. Meanwhile, I dropped a standard 12" paver in the "L" for sample purposes. I'll be building an L-shaped bench there. Also a long bench along the fence.


Peter likes the stairs. They have yet to be backfilled with gravel. Want to wait for it to dry out a little more. Once everything dries, I can put in the filler gravel on the steps and the filler sand on the patio.


The different blocks in the middle are under the firepit. I got a great deal on this fireplace/firepit from Home Depot.


Finally, we scored a killer deal at Fred Meyer for a fountain. It's nice and loud and really nice. It was on clearance PLUS a floor model discount PLUS my employee discount. So we got a $350 fountain for $125 :)

The other thing we did earlier in the year was add a couple of yard arts to the fruit tree area...

6/27/08 Latest fun - building the patio cover.  Yesterday, some neighbors helped me lift the very heavy back section into place.  The family and I had lifted the house side earlier.

And now the inner "L"...

I took three days off around July 20th and began work on the eating deck/circle.  Here's how the eating deck circle started out like. Actually, this is after about two hours of cleaning it up and getting rid of four wheelbarrow's full of dirt. Just started to layout the 4x4's...and you can see our pool consuming the patio to the left :)

After 2-1/2 days of carefully laying out and excavating, here's how it looked.  It was amazingly difficult to both lay out and dig - the ground is mostly rocks there.  Turns out the ground has settled some and the deck won't be perfectly circular, but I think I can cover most of it up.

I tested the centering by stringing all 8 4x4's and it came out dead on. Still have to trim them to their final length so they can accommodate the center octagon.  Shortly after taking this picture, I trimmed all the boards to allow a full 18" diameter octagon and began cutting the pieces for it.  Also excavated the center out.

Here's some of the rocks I pulled out!  I actually used some of them to backfill the holes where the concrete supports are for the deck.

on to page 8...

Phil