Garden Path - The Final Frontier

It's well past time for the (apparently semi-)yearly Garden Path update. I have promised to keep it real, so here's the lowdown.

It's been two three years. Regular readers may recall that two years ago (the year after we made it in the first place) we re-did the path due to some bad weathering. The last two springs our whole back yard flooded. 

Before the flood last year, the path was in okay shape. I took a peek between the snow melt and the deluge. But once the water receded this is what I found:

The disks had floated up, some clear out of the garden. Sad day.

Honestly, I couldn't make up my mind for awhile on whether on not I wanted to fix it. The disks were in good shape, so it just would have been a matter of resetting them. But would I be doing this every year?

After making our path the first time, I discovered that the original pin I'd seen was from a home and garden show where it was never exposed to the elements. So after contemplating all my issues with it, including knowing it is incredibly popular and people seem to want it to work, I finally came to the conclusion that it's just not worth it to keep it.

Well into the fall, when I finally decided, Matt and I began to rip out all the disks and Matt started to replace the path with bricks.

We still had bricks leftover from the patio project, and I thought it would nicely tie things together.

However, instead of laying them smooth side up, I chose to have the holes exposed. It adds interest, drainage and traction.

After setting them in, Matt back filled with the dirt. This not only helps pack them in place, but fills the holes making it look nicer.

But that's about as far as we got last fall before hard frost set in and we had to give it up until spring.

Good news/Bad news. It flooded again. But that let us see how even incomplete the path stayed in place. So, forward ho! 

Now it's done. And I actually kind of like better than the wood. (Even though the wood was super cool, I know!)

I have had to weed it a bit, but a ground cover growing in the holes and cracks is always an option.

So...forgive me for abandoning the wood path?
You've gotta admit, the brick is still a bit quirky and interesting laid this way. :)

Us vs. the Leaves

If it were up to Matt, he'd never remove the leaves. He doesn't think he needs to tamper with nature or God. I, however, eventually get sick of looking at them.

We resisted a leaf blower for a long time. I have issues with gassing up lawn tools to take care of nature. Polluting to make a pretty lawn just kind of irks me. But we finally bought an electric leaf blower. Partly because we can't rake the new patio, and we have a long driveway and I hate the sound of rakes scraping concrete. Worse than fingernails on a chalkboard to me. (Yes, we sweep it, but that takes forever, and sometimes you just quickly rake the edges. You know what I mean.)

Matt and I are in disagreement though. I think after using it, that a leaf blower only makes you feel like it's less work, but that it doesn't actually save you anything at all. Matt says, not so! It really is less labor (though he admits probably not less time).

He's wrong of course. :) But what do you think? For me, I can rake faster than I blow the leaves because when you blow them you have to go back and forth and there is not nearly as much control. I also think the blower is heavy and so my back hurt more when I was done. Matt has more upper body strength so he thought it was less achy to use the blower.

The part I like though is the vacuum attachment. You can suck up the leaves and it chops them into a bag. This at first seems like it would take longer, but I raked and put leaves in the wheelbarrow, wheeled it to where they needed to go, dumped it, came back and did this five more times. With the vacuum, it was two trips. Plus the vacuum works better in planting beds and on our patio.

But I have to say, walking around vacuuming your yard just feels weird!

On Deck

Yesterday was a gorgeous beginning of fall kind of day. Sitting out on the deck I realized that I never did post about the deck!

We did the deck before the patio, so you would think I'd have shown you that. But because the patio runs right up to the deck, the yard was all quickly under construction after it was done. Didn't make for good pictures.

Here is what our deck looked like.

The steps are on the side and they were tilted and not the most secure. 

We all tended to just leap off the front.

So, we decided we needed steps along the whole front that wrapped around the side where they originally were.

For this project, I pretty much said what I wanted and Mateo did it. It's not that I can't build things; it's that he's better and faster. That is the great thing about having a partner. We have each others strengths to rely on too.

There is actually a bit of finish work to do. Facing on the risers, but it has made such a huge difference. 

We are not doing anything about the color right now. We are going to leave the wood to weather until next summer. Hopefully it will more closely match the deck and we can either stain or just seal them both then.

And no more leaping off the front or chancing the crooked stairs. We can just walk down wherever we want. It also makes the whole deck look much bigger. Yay for optical illusions. :)

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Patio Finally!

Lesson learned from DIY-ing a patio: don't DIY a patio! Just kidding -- sort of.

Original plan was to make a gravel patio like the one I'd seen in Coastal Living magazine while waiting at the dentist.

But then a neighbor was getting rid of a wall's worth of bricks, so we thought maybe we can use them to make a patio.

It took a lot of effort to bring them back.

Some were whole, some broken, almost all had mortar that needed to be chipped off using a mason's chisel and hammer. 

This process took a day's worth of work. Taking turns.

It's not hard, but it takes time and it's tiring. Once we got several stacks of bricks we were able to have a better idea of how much the brick would cover for us.

6 of the stacks of 40 bricks, we eventually used 10 stacks.

We tried different patterns, knowing we couldn't solidly cover the whole space. We wanted something open that could be filled in with gravel.

This is a sort of open herringbone pattern, but shortly after setting this up, we had a better count on the brick and realized that it just wasn't going to be enough.

Time to regroup and decide what the patio should look like.

Another part of the prep was to lay out the patio. I used spray paint to mark the edges.

We rented a sod cutter to take out the grass.

But that wasn't deep enough to fit the sand base and bricks so we had to dig this deeper by hand. And when I say we, it was mostly Matt.

Our ground naturally sloped away from the garage and house, so we really just had to maintain that. But to do so included stakes and strings and levels.

And headaches. Lots of headaches.

Once we were happy with the ground, we laid weed barrier. And of course it was windy that day, so we hurriedly placed sand on the weed barrier to hold it down.

We added sand and used our string to maintain our slope, and used our homemade handy dandy tamper. 

Why buy what you can rig up?

Filled with sand and all tamped down.

So, then we went with Plan G and placed the bricks on the edges in a zipper-like pattern, or chevron if you prefer.

Near the garage and the gate, we had the zipper spread into an expanded herringbone pattern.

After sweeping sand into the crevices, it was time to get the gravel. I really wanted stone that was slightly larger, but all the stone around here was very sharp if it was bigger so I was forced to go with pea gravel. (And yes, picture me at stone yards sans shoes and socks walking over stones. You gotta do what you gotta do!)

The space against the garage will become a planting bed.

So, more shoveling.

We filled the space with gravel.

Personally, I like the way the gravel looks when it's wet better than dry, but the reason I'm glad we went with it is because we can run across it in bare feet.

It took us 2 weeks of considerable effort. Only a few days in that time frame were not spent on the patio. We have a patio that is approximately 350 sq. ft. We used somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 bricks. Matt priced the brick at a store and realized that we were saving anywhere between $400- $1000 by reclaiming these bricks! And that doesn't even cover the the whole expanse. I can't imagine paying for a patio this large.

We spent $60 on the sod cutter rental, $75 in sand (and this would have been closer to $300 had we not bought in bulk), $70 on the gravel (again, bought in bulk). The bricks were free, so in the end we spent $205 to build our patio. It would have been several thousand to be professionally done with all pavers.

So, you can see we have to repair the yard where there are now dirt patches, and we still have to deal with the dirt we took out and the mortar we chipped off. In the end, it was worth it to have the patio.

I got to wear many days worth of crazy stylish outfits:

What do you think? Will I be setting the fashion world ablaze? Ha, ha.

And suffered some injuries:

Sorry, some of you are freaked out by that. I won't do it again.(Probably.) But that is to illustrate why we should always wear shoes when chiseling mortar off bricks.

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Garden Path

[Update: click here to see how it all fared after a year and the answers to the most frequently asked questions. Click here to see the final outcome.]

Our vegetable garden is divided among four raised beds.

The grass in between was a pain to trim so we wanted some sort of path and at first we thought mulch. But then, on Pinterest, I saw a cut wood path that was wicked cool.

Matt and I had plenty of wood from when our trees were trimmed. We took turns cutting two inch (or so) disks from the logs. All different sizes.

We had to dig into the ground to press them in. Often I had to pack extra dirt around the edges. I'm not going to lie, this was a bit of a pain.

It's quite lovely. I really like the look. The trouble is that unlike stone pavers which are heavy, the wood is light and pops up rather easily.

We are planting ground cover thyme in the spaces and we hope that over time that will help hold everything down. Plus it will just look pretty. :) Thyme can stand up to foot traffic and it can still be picked.

But while we are waiting for that to grow, it's still nice.

Linking to the Pinterest Challenge:
Young House Love
Bower Power
Emily Henderson
Making a House a Home

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Playing with Dirt

Compost is best aged like a fine wine. I don't know who said that, but I suppose it's true.

My husband wanted to compost so badly, he started before he even had a bin. He just started piling yard waste behind the garage. This might have been fine if we had no neighbors who could see this. Enough was enough. We had to make this presentable.

We had a small bit of fence that we took out to replace with white pickets. And I salvaged some more fence planks from the side of the road. Matt used these to construct his bin.

It's a simple rectangle with a slanted bottom so that that compost slides forward for easier access.

The bottom front planks have handles so they can be pull out to access the best stuff and slid back in to close.

The lid lifts off for adding more yard waste and to be able to turn it.

I don't think we will have to do much though because thanks to its beginnings on the ground, we are loaded with worms. Loaded! So that is awesome. We wanted to go the vermiculture route anyway. It was nice of nature to just take care of that for us. :)

I love the cobbled look. I also love that we recycled this. Even the nails! Matt had to pry the nails out to use the planks and he reused them. And, of course, this compost will provide great nutrients for our garden.

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Just a Little Trim

I love it when something free makes a great impact. We knew our trees needed trimmed. Around here, the trees on the easement between the sidewalk and street are the city's responsibility. So we had them come out and trim. It opened things up so well. And free! (Okay, property taxes, but I didn't pay out of pocket.)Those trees are super tall, even if I took pictures, it wouldn't be that clear, so I didn't bother.

So, I started looking at our other trees.

The lower branches were drooping.

This one reminded me of Cousin It. I couldn't see the tree for the leaves.

Um, it should go without saying, but what Matt did wasn't the safest thing in the world, so do so at your own risk.


He got out the ladder, and sawed the branches that he could reach safely (our definitions of safely turned out to be wildly different! Eeek!)


They look great.

Sorry, whole new angle on this tree for no good reason.

No more Cousin It.

Hey! There's a whole 'nother side of house over there! ;)

This post may be linked at the following parties (for their Blog Buttons see my Link Love page): (M) Mad Skills , C.R.A.F.T., Amaze Me Monday, Sumo's Sweet Stuff, Singing Three Birds,  Masterpiece Mondays, Making the World Cuter, Sarahndipities, A Little Birdie Told Me (T) Stories of A to Z, The Blackberry Vine, How To's Day , Type A, Amaze Me August, Ten Buck Tuesday, Handmade Tuesdays, Anything Related, Tuesday's Treasures, Strictly Homemade, Show Me What Ya Got, Time to Shine, Show Off Your Crafty Side (W) Whassup Wednesday, Blue Cricket Design, Look What I Made, What I Whipped Up, The Trendy Treehouse, Wicked Awesome Wednesday , Good Life Wednesday, Inspiring Creativity, Sweet Peas & Bumblebees (TH) Beyond the Picket Fence  Creative Juice, Somewhat Simple, Thrifty 101 , Smilemonsters , Everything But the Kitchen Sink, Shabby Chic Cottage, Thrifty Thursdays, House of Hepworth's, Thrilling Thursday, (F) Fingerprints on the Fridge, Furniture Feature Friday, SevenThirtyThree , Lovely Crafty Weekend , Simply Designing, Creative Corner, Tickled Pink 504 Main, Inspiration Friday at The Picket Fence, Friday Flair, Remodelaholic, For the Kids Fridays, Frugal Friday, Craft Goodies, I'm Lovin' It, Flaunt It Fridays (Sat) Tatertots and Jello , Anything Goes (Sun) Creative Blog & Hop, Sundae Scoop