Major patio progress

Wednesday we had our driveway full of rock and Mark came back and brought it all back to the patio.  Even better - he brought five pallets of pavers to the backyard with a bobcat.  We would have been hating life carrying these big ones to the back.  So again- he is the hero of our DIY project.

Saturday I took the boys to Des Moines to run errands so Keith could work without constant distractions.
My mom was so kind to join me and help me keep the boys entertained because a majority of my stops were returns.  I was super annoyed because I left early -only to learn basically everything opens at 10.
I can probably better explain our trip by all the bathrooms we made visits in:  Babies R Us, Valley West Mall (2x), Jennifer's store and Josephs.  

Keith spent a majority of the day compacting the rock and then leveling the first row of blocks - this part takes FOREVER!! But very important to do right.  So everything else goes much faster once you have that set.  Sunday we were able to get the entire wall up and glued.  We have a couple pieces we still have to cut and are still looking for the right pieces to put on top of the columns.  We are going to hold off gluing the fire pit blocks down until we see how tall it is once we get the rest of the pavers down.  The worst part about this portion was moving the blocks - these ones are SUPER HEAVY!!!  Keith is hurting a bit after moving all these. If I weren't pregnant it would have gone much faster but I don't think it was in my best interest to move those.  So I glued and Keith put down the block.  At least the pavers for the patio are MUCH lighter weight.

This week we need to get sand and then next weekend we will do our best to get all our pavers down.  It will be a bit of a challenge because it is a large area and hard to keep the sand level if we are too slow!  

 

We are thinking it is a bit of a large patio!  No turning back now. It started smaller and somehow ended up bigger!  So hopefully it looks good when we are done.  We are pretty excited to enjoy some evenings around the fire.  Too bad our Russell Ave friends aren't right next door to enjoy.