Last spring, we went to Costco for our usual weekly grocery shopping. In the lobby, they had a display of various types of flagstones one could purchase from them. It's a display they put up every year at the same time. My wife had seen it many times before, and an idea had built up in her head that she would like a flagstone patio. Now that we'd moved to a new house, we had a need of some sort of patio in our backyard. So, the stars aligned, and we started on our journey toward flagstone patio ownership.
We borrowed a trailer from my sister and used it to haul two tons of stone to our house. We rousted all the kids out to help us unload them one stone at a time, and re-stack them in the garage. We hired a contractor to do our backyard for us, but didn't include the patio as part of the deal. Instead, we marked out the spot that we wanted the patio to be, and told him to put the lawn in around it.
I think we expected to do the patio last year, before fall ended, but our contractor took a lot longer than we expected to finish our backyard. What we did manage to do was get the posts for the pergola that would go above the patio put into the ground. Then we had to call it a year.
We were pretty bummed, because the two tons of stone was still in the garage taking up space and making us unable to use the garage as a parking space. My wife got fed up with scraping the ice off her windows in the morning pretty quickly.
In a fit of chivalry, I went out and spent my whole Saturday morning re-stacking the rocks closer to the wall to make parking in the garage possible for her, but it turned out that her van was longer than I'd thought possible. She still couldn't park in the garage...but my little Fiat could. Chivalry backfired on that one.
Eventually, spring came around again. While things were still wet and soft in the backyard, we went after it with the shovels, excavating the place we'd marked off for our patio. My wife said that her internet research had told her to dig at least nine inches down. She kept telling me I needed to dig deeper and deeper. And then later when it was time to fill the hole back in, told me I'd dug too deep.
Once we'd finished excavating, my wife ordered the road base we needed to pack into the bottom of the hole:
And the sand that would go on top of that road base:
The stinking place that delivered it to us refused to dump anywhere but on our driveway or the street. It was against their policy to drive around and put it into the hole where we needed it, supposedly to avoid liability if they break a sprinkler or something. I wonder if I could hold them liable for my medical bills from my back going out while hauling the dirt. We took the dirt, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow to the place in the backyard where it belonged.
Luckily for us, a friendly neighbor saw us doing this, and volunteered his services, and more importantly the services of his bobcat to get that dirt to the backyard. So, that gigantic pile of dirt made its way to our backyard in a few short hours. Unfortunately for me, we had way more road base than we needed. The pile rose several feet out of the hole. So, the wheelbarrow couldn't be put away for good. Instead of moving the dirt from the driveway to the patio hole, I had to move it from the patio hole to the empty lot beside our house.
Spring break rolled around, and somewhere during that week, I finally finished flattening the hill out. We were ready to tamp it down, and get going with the sand and the stones.
We rented a compactor machine, and I drove it around the patio's footprint for a while as it pulverized the dirt into place. Once we had that taken care of, it was time to start bringing in the sand, and placing the stones. The wheelbarrow came back into play, as we shoveled it full of sand, and pushed it up the hill from the street to our backyard and dumped it. Then we started placing stones.
Like when you're building a puzzle, we placed stones all the way around the outside first, then started putting them in the middle. It wasn't long before we realized that we didn't have nearly enough stones for the gigantic patio we'd marked off. I wished that I could run and grab our contractor and have him just put grass over everything, but it was too late for that. Instead, we needed more rock.
As luck would have it, it was springtime again, and Costco had their flagstone display up. We went and bought another two tons. Only this time we didn't have my sister's trailer. Instead my oldest son and I loaded the rocks one by one into the van at Costco, then unloaded them one by one to our backyard. I think my son was starting to wish he was back at school his spring break was turning out so rotten.
We kept at it, putting rocks into place as if they were puzzle pieces.
It was difficult, considering that there was no guarantee that the pieces we had would actually fit together. my wife and I split the duties. She seemed to think that my skill with fitting the rocks together was better than her own, so she assigned that detail to me, and spent her time leveling the rocks that I had placed for her.
Eventually we placed all the rocks, and we brought up a few wheelbarrows full of sand to put between the stones we'd placed and fill in those cracks. It looked pretty good.
Except for the fact that we still didn't have enough rocks to fill all the space yet!
And when we went back to Costco, they'd sold out of all their stone. We didn't know what to do. If we found stone somewhere else, it probably wouldn't match the rest of the stone we'd already used. And that was if we could find it. It sure wasn't available at Home Depot, or some place like that. All we did know was that we were done for now.
I was glad to be done for a while. I'd worked so much that every muscle in my body was complaining. I needed to go back to work to get a vacation from my vacation.
Then a miracle happened. A few weeks later, Costco got a new load of stone in. We rushed right out, and bought another ton...and loaded it one rock at a time into the back of the van again. Then transported it back to the house. I spent a few nights puzzling those rocks together until the hole was filled. Then, my wife spent a few more nights leveling those rocks off, and finally, we filled the cracks with sand, and we were done!
I think it turned out really well. It'll probably need some more sand in the coming weeks, and again and again over the coming years too. Then of course there's that pergola that needs to be built above it. But, for the time being, we're done. We're going to sit back and enjoy it for a while before moving on to any more big backyard projects.
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