A little less fussy: Did I ever tell you about the patio?

Whoops. We spent a bunch of time resetting our patio recently.

Here is what it looked like on moving day.

I swear it's underneath the crabgrass - do you see the bricks??

Here is another (worse) angle.
It's sloping TOWARD the foundation.

So yeah, we spent a ton of time rebuilding a retaining wall and then moved on to the patio. It took a little more time than we thought, but since we can't plant anything in late March/early April, we had the benefit of awesome weather and nothing else to do but rebuild stuff.

I've forgotten the order of operations, but it goes something like this...

1. Pick up bricks and restack them near where you're going to reset the patio. Duh.

2. Level the new bed for the bricks. We used a gravel/stone mixture the guy at the landscaping place told us to.

3. Reset the bricks. We used a basketweave pattern because that is what was there before and since we removed the railroad ties from within the patio, we didn't want to take the chance that we'd run out of bricks. It was a close call anyway, but we made it with a few to spare :)

That's how many bricks we had left.

Close up of the pattern

We used spikes from the railroad ties we removed
to keep our level line for laying the brick.

Note about keeping the lines straight. We totally spaced this part. We thought it would be awesome to have it ready to go and then have the kids come out and help lay the bricks. We also thought this would take about an hour. Wrong on both counts. What happened is this.

it was 1000 degrees outside that morning

it was 1/2 hour before lunchtime

the bricks are not in any way, shape, or form a uniform size

Here is a recipe for disaster - put the factors above together and you get a cranky family trying to finish something as fast as possible so they can go inside and cool off and eat.

Also you get a really crooked line for your patio.

So, we went inside and ate, the kids got busy doing something else, and John and I went outside and realized that we needed to pull up the 2 or 3 rows we already set and start over. So we did.

We also realized that we needed to have some sort of guide for keeping the lines even. We grabbed some spikes we kept from removing the railroad ties (they are 3 feet long BTW, you haven't lived until you spend a day prying those out of 30 year old rotted wood) and strung some twine for our line.

Don't think we are MENSA material here, I'm pretty sure that is what you are supposed to do, we just thought we were too talented and didn't need the extra guidance. Chumps.

Moving on...

After you've spent several hours - the charming rustic bricks that aren't the same size make for a lot of trial and error in setting them - you are ready for the next step...

4. Sweep sand into the gaps. Repeat (and repeat) as necessary. We didn't use the polymeric sand, just regular old sand. This takes some patience since the sand needs to settle within the cracks. We spent a little time each evening for a couple of nights sweeping sand into the gaps that kept reappearing, and then had a terrific thunderstorm to really pack the sand in between the gaps before it looked perfect.

Here are some photos...

BEFORE:

I still can't believe we bought this...