Well, we tried

We tried to get the patio finished this past weekend, but it bested us. Well, actually, it was a combination of the patio and the bloody weather that beat us into submission, but the effect is the same: we needs must spend another week looking at a half-finished project before we can (hopefully) call it done. Let's hope the weather and our moods improve by Saturday, or it might well be another week on top of that...

To fully tell this story accurately, however, we'll have to back up a bit, and spend some verbiage recapping some of the finer details that I missed in my barely coherent Q&A ramblings from last week. I'd like to think I did my readers (like I have more than one, shyeah!) a favor by not posting last night or it would have been nothing more than mild cursing interspersed with onomatopoetic grunts.

So, not much different than a usual post, then.

Anyway, I had intended to put up a post mid-week with some of the finer details of our efforts last weekend, but there wasn't really time what with all the prepping we were doing, so you get the tech writer's standard solution to any problem that can't be solved by a table: the bulleted list!

• The excavator we had delivered was actually the larger of the two available. We had hoped for the smaller one, and the sudden appearance of this massive machine resulted in several things happening: first, the War Department became immediately convinced that I would drive the thing right through the side of the house. Actual quote: "It's not like a video game!" Second, we had to modify the hedge in the side yard to make room:

• It's not like we weren't planning on taking out that hedge entirely at some point, but at least the one plant we did have to take out came up pretty easily.
• I didn't realize until the next day that the shots I posted of the "final" hole didn't really capture the sheer grandeur of the pit we made ("That's a nayce hole!") so here's one from another angle that shows the depth a little better:

• This Week In Mayonnaise!

• That's some of the stuff we hauled out of the hole. Mostly a bunch of sprinkler pipe (yeah, that'll have to get fixed) and a big, dirty, old chunk of really-I-have-absolutely-no-freaking-clue.
• This is one of the worst bulleted lists I've ever written, let alone published. Man, it's a good thing I don't do this for a living, isn't it?

(Oh, and by the way? It was EXACTLY like a video game. You know, if a video game could drive through the side of your house.)

Anyway, this past weekend started bright and early, as I headed off to the rental place first thing Saturday morning to pick up a plate compactor and a wet saw. By the time I got back to the house, our sprinkler guy was there to fix the stuff we had broken, followed shortly by the delivery of four yards of 3/4" road base:

Man, I really hate road base.

Wait, already I'm getting ahead of myself. This weekend actually started on FRIDAY morning, when the patio stones showed up just as the War Department was heading off to work:

I see a few wheelbarrow trips to the back yard in our future. Good thing the path has already been carved permanently into the lawn, eh?

Fortunately, the weather on Saturday was fantastic. I have no idea how, but we managed to convince one of our helpers from the weekend before to come and move gravel with us. Which is pretty much what we did all day. It kinda doesn't seem like a lot, but it was really a full day of shoveling, toting, raking, compacting, shoveling, toting, raking, levelling, raking, raking, raking, and compacting. Did I mention the raking? Man, that was a lot of raking.

But by the end of the day, we had filled in our hole with four inches of compacted, level road base:

Sunday, the weather was... less good. Overall, it wasn't terrible: cooler - which was nice for my sunburned neck - with a few isolated sprinkles. We spent the day building a retaining wall, again with help from Mr. Not-Those-Clarks-The-Other-Clarkes:

And then came Monday...

Let's just say the War Department isn't wearing that hat on a long weekend Monday morning because it's fashionable. (I think it's cute, but then I'm weird.) Monday kinda chewed us up and spat us out.

It rained ALL day. It RAINED all day. It rained all DAY. Emphasize whatever you want - it sucked.

I spent a few hours cutting pavers to serve as a cap for the retaining wall. This consisted of either standing in the driveway (in the rain) at the wet saw station, getting sprayed with a thin slurry of concrete dust as I tried to trim off the sides of pavers at just the right angle, or carting pavers back and forth from the driveway to the back yard, test fitting and marking and trying to make the damn pavers fit the curve of the wall.

That, I'm sorry to say, was the EASY job.

See, the gravel we had so carefully laid down? Yeah, that had to get covered up with sand. Exactly two inches of sand, which could not be disturbed or walked on after it was put in. Oh, and of course, the sand had to be taken from the driveway around the side of the house in wheelbarrows. Oh, but of course, we also now had a retaining wall in the way that we couldn't yet backfill because the rain meant the blocks were wet, and some of them couldn't be glued together yet. Which meant that all that sand had to be carted from the driveway to the backyard in BUCKETS and lifted over the retaining wall. And then it had to be screed and leveled.

Man, I'll take a freezing cold spray of concrete slurry over sand in buckets any day.

Once again, we were assisted by our friends so tried-and-true. (Seriously, if it weren't for them, we'd still be working on the damn road base. They were absolute troopers.) Oh, and the Crazy Neighbour™ toted his fair share of sand and pavers around to the back of the house for us. Not to mention all the tools, wheelbarrows, and materials he loaned us.

Of course, then we ran out of sand. Which is when the whole damn weekend kind of ... fizzled out.

I mean, we tried to keep going. But I couldn't actually attach the caps to the retaining wall because - again - too wet to glue. So the War Department raced off to Home Despot and found some bags of playground sand that would work to fill in the last little bit, and I got started installing pavers into the base of sand. But the pavers looked like hell, and we couldn't quite reach the last few holes without wrecking the rest of the sand. On top of all this, the rain was intensifying, and everyone was kind of cold and miserable. So we called it a day, and packed up. Our helpers didn't even stay for a beer, it was that depressing. (We'll make it up to them - promise.)

So we've got a half-finished patio and we'll have to rent the compactor and wet saw for another weekend.

Great.

(I had to wait until this evening to take pictures anyway; it was still raining...)

See how this post just kind of fizzles out? Yeah. That was our Monday.