Thursday 19 March 2015

Patio progress (and oh, WHAT progress)

Remember when I was dreaming of patios? Well SBB has made quite a bit of progress. In fact, he was a little shocked when I showed him the original post from August of last year - not for how it looked but because he thought he'd started work on it much earlier and in fact spent a couple of minutes telling me how my post was wrong. Erm...

Anyway, we've made quite a bit of progress (I say 'we' I mean 'he'). First up was to lay a concrete base. SBB did this at the end of August and destroyed a pair of trainers in the process of laying the first half (luckily he wore wellies the second time)



First steps on the patio!


Next was to build the wall to hide the ugly concrete path. It took us a couple of back-breaking weekends to source the stones and we added the ones we bought to the small stock that we had left over from the old rockery.

 Isn't it so pretty?
 SBB found a heart-shaped stone and set it in the centre. He's such a romantic :)

This was such a good find. It's an old fragment of gravestone that we found under an overgrown hedge. For a while we weren't sure what to do with it but as soon as we decided we were going to build a stone wall there was only one option.

So that was it for last year. The winter set in and building work ceased, waiting until for better weather. Now that's it's spring of course, SBB has a patio-shaped-bee in his bonnet however, there was a problem. We hadn't bought enough bricks to lay the entire patio and they had been discontinued. No herringbone for us, then.
We threw some ideas around and eventually decided upon a slab/cobble/motif combo.

SBB set out the brick border and then filled the cavity behind the wall with rubble before topping it with muck and smoothing it over.




We then grabbed a couple of bags of gravel (the wood's there to keep it from spilling onto the path).



We didn't use as much gravel as we thought so the rest will be going down in this awkward little corner - along with something else that I'm going to keep as a surprise!


So that's all so far. We managed to source some broken bricks so SBB will be laying those and then we'll have to shop for some slabs to go down!
I confess that this progress is starting to make me think of BBQs....

No comments:

Post a Comment