Patio Progress

The one slightly productive ramification of the temperatures dropping is that it's kicked our butts into gear about getting our lower patio finished. We don't exactly want to be scraping snow out of the way in order to lay our patio blocks. So we got to it. And got serious about it.

That's right--we've got ourselves an Excel spreadsheet. Drawn to scale and everything. We had a couple different ideas of how to lay the blocks, and figured this wasn't really a good step to just "wing". Arranging and rearranging forty pound patio blocks is not my idea of a good time. And Darrell figured that if we were going to do a scale drawing, we were going to do it right (or, in his words "perfect"). The design above isn't exactly the design we settled on, but I will give Darrell credit for the template he built; it was super easy to just highlight and fill different "cells" on Excel to get an idea for how the patio will look. Plus the drawing also gave us an exact count on how many of each color block we need--and also made us realize that we didn't initially measure the space correctly, so we had to go back out and spray again to kill more grass.

The plan for this weekend?? Get it finished! Of course, we first have to figure out how to get nearly two tons of patio blocks and leveling sand to our house.... And then spend the majority of an afternoon carrying the items one at a time to our backyard.... But those are just minor details :-)