Weekend Warriors

James & I spent the past weekend installing a walkway in our yard. I had Friday-Monday off, and James helped in between doing homework. The walkway goes from the courtyard in the front of the house to the back patio. It is 56 ft long and 2 ft wide. Between us and the doggies we had worn out the grass from walking back and forth from the front yard to the back. There was also a low area that held water. We had tried to fill it in with sand, but Daisy thought it was her own personal sandbox and would play in it every day - which only made the hole worse. It had become a mudpuddle - and the dogs didn't mind that. It was a new way for them to get dirty while outside. Everytime they came inside they would leave a track of little muddy paw prints.

I began working on the project on Friday morning. I went to Home Depot to get the pavers. I'd measured the area, and we needed about 128 paving bricks. We were using red and tan, so we needed 64 of each color. Neither of us have a truck, and I didn't want to pay for delivery, so I decided to make a couple of trips in my car. I loaded up 64 pavers on a cart at HD, and had someone load them in the trunk of the car. I knew they were heavy, but figured they weighed about 10 lbs each. I got home and got them unloaded and then went back for the rest. Someone loaded these for me too. I unloaded about 1/2 of them when I got home. When James got home that night he couldn't believe how low the car was still sitting. He told me the pavers weighed 20 lbs each, and that I had put 1280 lbs in the truck - twice. That's not too good for the car, but it didn't do any damage.

Saturday morning we began excavating where the walkway would go. We got most of the digging done that day. Sunday afternoon we finished up digging and laid a fabric weed barrier. Next we needed to put in a layer of sand to help level the surface out. We had purchased 12 small bags of sand, and we quickly found out we needed a lot more. We ended up using 18 additional bags and two 70 lb sacks of sand. James helped me get most of the pavers laid, but he left about 6:30 for a class at church. I worked for another hour, and got the rest laid. I might mention that it was COLD all weekend - so I took a hot bath when I got in and tried to turn on our gas log fireplace, but I couldn't remember how, and I was too scared of it to mess with it much, so that just had to wait for James to get back.

I worked on finishing it up on Monday while James was at school. I planted 10 Japanese Boxglove shrubs, and leveled the walkway off. I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. It's supposed to rain this weekend, so I'm anxious to see if our drainage problem has been corrected.