SO.
When we bought this house, we decided the deck was a little too big. It was 1,000 square feet. That's bigger than any one floor of our house. It had this weird privacy fence and was just big. PLUS it was ORANGE. AND add to all that, when the inspector came, he told us it was built incorrectly - there were no cement casons - no wood cemented into the ground. In fact, when he jumped on the deck is bounced...like a trampoline. So it had to go.
Before I post all the pictures and description and stuff, just in case you don't make it through the whole post, I figured thanks and acknowledgement of all the help we got should go here where everyone will see it.
First of all, NATE did so so so much of this. He used his paternity time and personal vacation for a lot of the work. That man could seriously work hours without food or a break while I felt like I needed a break all the time (and got them since I was also dealing with the kiddos).
Nate's parents DAN and KIPPY deserve a statue built in their honor in our backyard. They were over here nearly every weekend during the hardest parts of the process. Dan did so much of the heavy lifting and never stopped just like Nate. Kippy was out there helping all the time too, but more importantly, helped entertain Karly and held Tanner so I could help. We would probably still be working on it without them.
I also need to thank TRAVIS for taking apart the deck (see below) and MY DAD for helping while he was here to visit his grandkids (see below).
Now, there are like 40 pictures on this blog post. Just to save those of you who don't care about the process some time, here are the before and after shots (it worked to our benefit that we bought the house in January and finished in August - it's ugly outside in the before shot and beautiful outside in the after shot!)
Before:
After:
And another shot of mostly the patio:
So here we go from the beginning. Here is what the deck looked like when we bought the house:
BIG. ORANGE. Notice the rotting wood on the retaining wall?
You can't see it very well, but in the above picture, there is an area where they used to have a hot tub and covered it up with slats of wood that don't match up (more on the hot tub later).
While we were at Disneyland in May, our AWESOME (
and apparently bored?) brother Travis as well as Nate's parents ripped out the
entire deck. I think he did it in like 10 hours too. Pretty impressive! It saved us a ton of time, so we were VERY grateful for the help!
These are the pictures he sent us:
Another view from above before we started working...
Here are the piles of road base (rocks and concrete dust, basically - 4 inches to keep the patio from eroding) and sand (for leveling the pavers). It was 11 tons of road base and 3 tons of sand. Nate and Dan (and the missionaries for an hour) hauled that back - crazy heavy wheelbarrow loads.
These are the pallets of pave stones we used. There are 3 you can't even see. 10 pallets of very heavy pavers that we had to move to the back. Nate really did most of it, but his parents and I helped as well.
Okay, remember the hot tub? When we pulled up the deck and all the black tarp and rocks and crap underneath the deck, we found these tubes buried in a bunch of sand under where the hot tub would have been. We aren't 100% sure what they were for, but we think at least one of the (there were 3 separate tubes) was for draining the hot tub...straight into our neighbor's yard. Oh, and they ran under the sprinkler system, so I had to saw to get them out. These people were idiots.
This was after we pulled, pried, dug and chainsawed the retaining wall out.
See the lovely cement steps that were UNDER the deck? Nate and Dan had to sledgehammer those to pieces to get rid of them.
Obviously this is a big jump with no pictures. Retaining wall completed and stairs built. Those retaining wall stones (that we also used for the stairs) weighed anywhere from 20 to I think 40 pounds EACH. And we had to cut some of them to do the curves in the stairs. NOT fun.
A view of how the stairs went together.
This is after all the road base has been laid and compacted - ready for sand and pavers! (Can I tell you right here how annoying it is trying to grade the ground 1/8 in every 8 feet? There was a lot of digging and raking and moving dirt back and forth before we could even lay the road base).
Edging in place (the black line)
We used 1 inch thick PVC pipe and a 2x4 to scrape the sand along to make the sand level for the pavers.
Our pretty pattern in process...(notice the stacks of pavers along the edge - we were pretty anal about making sure we had a good mix of colors in every area of the patio).
Upper patio with all pavers laid!
And lower (ignore the stairs...)
So
then came the lovely task of cutting the pavers to fit the rounded edges and the stairs. I mentioned this in the post I did about my dad never coming to visit again because THAT is what he did for 8 hours on the hottest day on record in Colorado for the weekend he was here. He cut pavers with a big, loud brick saw. But with his amazing help (thank you!), we managed to get all the pavers cut and in place. YAY!
FINALLY, we finished up by putting the polymeric sand in the joints and allowing that time to cure, followed by sealing the pavers and last, but not least...
GRASS!
Nate and his parents did this while I was at my cousin's wedding. So I left home with a pretty patio and a dirt patch of a yard and came home to this beautiful green yard coming right up to our beautiful patio.
This past weekend, we also planted a couple of trees and a few bushes to get started on the border of our landscaped yard. Next year, we will be adding lots of bushes and flowers and a couple of fruit trees. I'll be sure to post again when it is even MORE beautiful!
