Day 1 - Lay out the area to pave and Dig up the yard for the patio

Day 2 –  Compact the ground – possibly lay some pavers

Day 3 – Lay out the pavers and seal , clean up, and sit on the patio

The reality was something far from that! Before we start – here are the before pictures:

Back yard before the digging

As you can see – it wasn’t terribly exciting – but this is what we were working with. What you can’t see here is tha tthere is a slight slope that we had to level out . That turned out to be totally easier said than done!

Day 1 - Lay out the area to pave and Dig up the yard for the patio

Peter did most of the heavy digging on this task. He literally dug up the entire area in under 2 hours. We foolishly thought that this was the hard work with this.  I took on the mission to haul the excess dirt behind the fence with a wheelbarrow. After he was done this is what we had :

Yard after the digging

At this point we were feeling totally motivated. We were convinced that this patio business was no big deal and that we’d be sipping cocktails in the back yard within 48 hours….

We picked up supplies at Home Depot. This was the first point where we started to realize the magnitude of what we were trying to do. We couldn’t get all of the pavers there in one trip. It took two trips with a truck. Fortunately we had a friend to help us haul the stuff off of the truck. Even getting the supplies at Home Depot was a mission. We picked what we wanted, we needed about 150 stone pavers, but the home depot didn’t have enough. So we picked a different type of stone paver. It took over an hour and a half  from the time we picked the paver till they were able to get them on the truck. We also had to get tons of bags of sand. We miscalculated – thinking that 37 bags would do it. Between the pavers ( no less than 20 lb each ) and the sand bags ( no less than 30 lb each ) this was way harder than we expected. Nevertheless we made the 75 minute limit for the Home Depot truck rental and made the two runs and offloaded everything.

The rest was a blur of energy drinks, dirt, sand, pavers, levels, and shovels. It was ugly! But we got through it.

Bags of Sand

Our backyard was now upgraded to this: 200 square feet of entertainment area. I love the fact that we did this but I swore NEVER AGAIN!

End Product :

This was our final patio