Landscaping plans

Not only have we been super busy with our usual May activities this month, we also have taken on a mammoth project in our yard. I have big plans for our yard, and since I'm impulsive, I have a tendency to start working on the big plans without thinking through things sometimes. My idea started with a combination of things. The first was an article in Real Simple magazine about having a backyard campout. They featured a really cool Smith and Hawken firepit to roast hot dogs or make s'mores around. I couldn't get this idea out of my head. Then I realized that our dogs had made somewhat of a path going from one side of our backyard, all the way along the back of the house, to the other side. Dogs will do this. They like to run in the very same place to go bark at things or see out the cracks in the fence. I decided it would be really cool to expand on the path, widen it and border it and fill it in with stepping stones, and even cooler to have a circle in the middle where we could put chairs (adirondack, of course) around a firepit one day.

Lovely in theory. Hell to execute. (This should be my new motto for all my cockamamie ideas).

We decided to do this in stages, with the strip along the back porch first. The first few days of digging out monkey grass went really quickly because it had just rained buckets the few days before. By the end of the week the ground was like concrete and I was using the soaker hose to loosen everything up. I had read up on path-building, and after Jav helped me dig out some more of the dirt, we put landscape plastic down and I started to put the border up. This actually took a couple of weeks (working while Gabriel napped), and I finally got the hang of using paving sand to even out the bricks. It also helped to add some of the dirt back in and pack it against them to hold them in place. Now we are finally ready to fill in with more sand, stepping stones and gravel.

I almost had a heart attack when Jav came home saying that the gravel company he went to for a quote said it would take at least a half a ton of gravel to fill our 20 foot section of path. A HALF A TON. WTF? We are hoping now that we added dirt back in, and once we get the stepping stones set in, that it will not take that much. Regardless, we are spending way more than we thought it would cost and it is taking way more time than we originally figured. And this is just the beginning. We can't stop now or we'd have a section of path that goes nowhere in our backyard, and how goofy would that be? I guess I should've started at one end or the other in case we ran out of steam. But too late now!