Our Large and In Charge Patio!

So...this post is soooo late!  We worked on this the last weekend in June.....epic fail on my part in getting the pictures taken and posted.

Since our new deck was put in, the patio underneath was basically in shambles!  It was piles of dirt everywhere, which meant lots of mud was coming into the house when Sadie went out.  It drove me NUTS!  Thankfully, my Mom, Dad, and brother were able to come over on short notice and hammer out the new patio.

I didn't do a good job of getting before an after pics, so the during pics will have to suffice

I lost Sadie for a little bit and found here chilling on the new deck:

Since so much dirt was being removed, we hauled it down to underneath the swingset.  The ground was starting to sink (because of old wood chips) so it worked really nice.  Here it was during the process:

And after:

And the afters of the patio:

I'm so happy with how it turned out!  Thanks again to my fam for helping!

Next year we are going to add some planter boxes around the deck footings so it looks more finished.

I'm still working on moving rock around the air conditioner....which will take me like 5 years at the pace I'm going....

Our New Deck!!!

When we bought our house in 2007 we realized that the deck needed to be replaced.  After all, you couldn't get to the fenced in yard from the upstairs unless you went out the front of the house and around.  Thanks to generous gifts from our wedding we were able to afford to get it replaced this year and thank goodness we did!  As the contractor was tearing it down he found numerous problems with it.  For example, the flashing against the house was screwed into existing flashing, some boards were not screwed in properly (too short or missed the board completely), and the footings were held in by barely a foot of cement so he could basically just kick them down.  Yikes!  To think of all the people that were on there and it could have easily collapsed..scares the bejeebies out of me!

And of course, since none of our projects go as planned, this one didn't want to feel left out and took about 3 weeks to get done instead of a week and a half to two weeks.  ::sigh::

In any event, I'm glad it is done!  And done early enough that we can enjoy it the rest of the summer!

Before pics:

During the teardown:
See how the footing on the left is out?  The contractor just kicked it and it fell...not good!

 

New flashing done right!

Starting to look like a deck...eek!

Deck boards are down!

Yay the landing for the steps that will go into the fenced in yard!

Railing is going up!

The new landing coming out of the garage.

 Steps to go into the yard are in!!  Sadie was scared to use them at first but now she's got the hang of it!

And the almost final pictures (he still has to put in a bench next to the grill)

I'm so excited that it's (almost) done!  I can't wait to enjoy it!