This post is weeks overdue! Sorry!

So we have this nice shady tree and we find ourselves in the shade on these hot summer days, seeing as there was already a flagstone ‘patio’ that fit a little tiny bistro table on it, BARELY… we decided to completely redo, and at least quadrupole the area. If you sit just right the table or chair legs would slowly sink into the mud between the stones… and that was worse than standing up too fast when a little drunk. Haha.

In addition we are to disconnect the downspouts and drain into the yard vs the city sewer system, and I don’t want any gutters going into my lawn, and especially across my new path! So this patio, if done right, could double as a rain garden.

As you know me by now, I love pinterest, and looked up several ‘rain garden’ and ‘flag stone patio’ pictures for inspiration.  Ultimately combining a few to get an idea to do a flag stone patio with tiny crushed rocks in between NOT sand, as sand washes away per my reading.  The flagstone would not be fitted or touching one another but we would leave a good inch gap in between, filled with crushed or tiny pebbles, for which the rain to seep thru.  I also found a picture where someone used quickcrete over rhubarb leaves and used three leaves to then be a little gutter downspout, and thought this may be a good way of ‘shooting’ the water over the brick path into the rain garden patio.  The water should have some velocity from the fall, so it should come out the bottom on the leaves with some pressure and the leaves can then be a waterfall like guide…  I will put pictures that is better then me trying to explain.

I still am addicted to face book market place and of course used that as my main method to find and purchase additional flag stones.   We made two stops for more flagstones.  I found a wonderful family in Sussex area getting rid of some flagstone.  I was able to get  few good sized pieces but mostly medium and smaller ones.  My version of medium is anything less than like a foot by a foot.  My version of large is around that foot, and EXTRA large would be like 18 inches or bigger.    I took about 20 pieces in total and they charged me $20 for them.   A few days later, on a Friday I was able to secure a double stop in the Racine area.   I found more flagstone for $50 – I would guess 30 to 35 medium to large pieces.  Which we didn’t really find any of those for a reasonable price, BUT those were the size we had already at home… and again with the rain garden aspect we need those gravel spaces.  The second stop of this double stop was for a wonderful 20 to 25 year old wrought iron patio set:  table, four chairs, and an umbrella with stand.

So we setout digging up the area between two sets of random brick designs in the grass, or really three brick designs but the middle one we took out. This digging and going thru any tree roots sucked! I posted earlier in my brick path post that we dug up the grass quick the weekend I fell and took all the skin off my hand(s). Okay, not all, but it bled like the damage was worse than it was! This process is slow, and since we weren’t at it for any full day, nor during the weekdays, it took us a few weekends to get it satisfactory. We also had to dig out the existing flag stones and gather up additional stones since we were at least quadrupling the space.

We used the table in the grass immediately, it is a life changer for sure!  Stone wise… we didn’t have enough yet.  I guessed we needed another 5 or 6 large pieces or one more ‘extra large’ piece too…  but alas we have a little tiny walk way from the sidewalk to the curb and there is 3 or 4 large pieces there and one extra large piece under our outside faucet.  So we decided to scavenge those and see if we could make things work.  As we started to dig out that little walk way, much to both our surprise, there was twice the amount of flagstone we thought.   There was some buried under mud and others were half the stone was under grass.   We quickly put some of the leftover bricks here to keep a path, and we’ll add finishing that to a later project.  We rarely use that walkway to the curb, but its nice to have and would look cute.

All the flagstone we laid in the grass– A. to get them out of the way for the digging and such, but B. to also see what we had to make it easier to pick and choose them.   We assumed we would wrap up in a few days, so never thought anything of killing the grass… we’ll the roots took longer to chop thru, and then it rained, and then… so it took us a week to get the mud pit ready for the next step:  the gravel.

Digging complete, we setout to get gravel bright and early on the following Saturday.   Now this part takes the cake of the whole project.  The look on the fake hubby’s face I will laugh at the rest of my life!  Here is why…

Me:  Hunny how many bags are on a pallet, like doesn’t a pallet weigh 3,000 pounds.  Can your truck handle that??

Fake Hubby:  3,000 should be just fine and to be safe I googled my truck model and it can handle a max of 3,500 pounds so we have plenty of room to spare…

Me:  hmmm… ooookkkkaaayyyy.

And we left for Home Depot (after breakfast of course).

I won’t bore with how long it took to find someone that can operate a forklift, but since we were buying basically a whole pallet (I guess they took a few bags off as a whole pallet is more than 60 bags!! Each bag at 50 lbs) it makes sense for them to palce the pallet into the truck bed then have to ‘load’ it by hand.

There was a dude to guide, a dude on a forklift and me and the Fake Hubby…  to get this loaded up.  First off the three guys claimed it wouldn’t fit and tried to get it on the forklift sideways, to no avail.  They looked defeated… but I had to say.. um hunny I thought your truck bed was the exact width of a ‘standard pallet’ are you sure this isn’t a standard pallet…  tape measures come out and sure as shit we would have like a quarter inch at best to spare… so in goes the pallet.

The lift comes up with the pallet over the truck, and slowly starts to lower it just barely tween the wheel wells.

The truck suspension goes down with the weight…

The pallet is lowered more…

The Truck is groaning its back is breaking from the weight…

The pallet is lowered more…

The jaws of all three men dropped, but the Fake Hubby the most – jaw dropped, shocked, like a ghost just walked past.  Quickly becomes this holy shit look…as the pallet is in the truck and lift backs up.

The truck gave a final ooooof and the Fake Hubby went from shock to deep concern like we just killed his new tan colored, rust over the back wheel, Ford best friend.

I couldn’t help myself… I laughed and had to say – 3500 pounds hey!!

There was ZERO suspension left.  The truck tires were like a half inch from the truck itself.

We drove 5 to 10 miles an hour the whole way home, taking deep turns, and…

As soon as we got close to home the Fake Hubby called his daughter to get outside and meet us to unload.  We parked on the wrong side of the street to the tuck bed was closed to where we wanted to plunk the bags and the Fake Hubby, from the ground level, started frantically unloading bags into my arms and his daughters to get the weight off the truck.  He wouldn’t get onto the truck because he didn’t want to add any more weight to it until it had some relief.   We unloaded that truck faster than any full truck load we have ever unloaded before.  The Ford friend, with each round of bags coming out of the bed, gave a sigh of relief, as the truck slowly raised.  It wasn’t until we were a good 2/3’s unloaded that the Fake Hubby seemed to have some color back into his face from seeing his ghost.  (ok just kidding, but makes me laugh because his attitude change so much when the truck had suspension again…!!).

I still laugh…especially because the previous weekend we used my CR-V to get some bricks and I was questioned if my car baby could handle the weight… we were low riding, but NOTHING compared to his Ford bff on this day!! 

I digress….

60 bags into the patio mud pit and we took some flag stones to ‘measure’ how high we wanted them as we went.  Since they were various thicknesses we would have to use the gravel to adjust to get them relatively smooth, well as smooth as you can get uneven stones…   yeah, we would need more gravel….  We did however layout all of the flagstone   We placed them on the gravel so we could free the grass and hopefully not kill it more as well as to get a better gauge at what we may need to complete the project.

Sunday we had to go to Franklin for more gravel as guess what – our Bay View Home Depot was out.  Apparently when you take half of their stock the previous day…lmao.  We got 12 more bags, as at 12 bags you get a price break, so why not!  If we had extra we still needed some for the pond.  We set to leveling and placing more gravel, and… we only had until noon to work today as we had plans to go see a friend in Plymouth, and for the Fake Hubby to look at her roof repairs.  We did maybe a quarter of the patio so a decent start I guess, but I was really hoping more would be done. 

Every week day that week – as we could, that it didn’t rain, we tried to get few more done and leveled.  We sucked it up Thursday and worked til like 8:30 before ordering food for dinner and calling it quits.  But it was DONE and ready for the crushed rock to fill in the gaps!  Or was it….  We noticed there was a sink hole in the one ‘corner’.  Fake Hubby got more pea gravel and we fixed it…raising it up so it didn’t look caved in… so much for working in the twilight hours.  So 60 bags on the pallet, plus the 12 more, and now 5 more here.  There went a few more days…  the weekend I also investigated what I could use the for fill crushed rock.  We found and settled on the red decomposed granite from Advance Landscape on Howell.  They sell by the bushel basket…makes me hungry… can we go to the farmers market??  I believe we bought 4 bushels of granite.  TIP: fill the bushel in the truck, once full the Fake Hubby could hardly lift the first one to dump it into the truck bed… much heavier than you’d think for this stuff!  We dumped it onto a tarp so we wouldn’t have to sweep the truck later.

We shoveled it out into a wheel barrow and I used a kids sand bucket, with a little spout,  to disburse the decomposed granite into the cracks.  Fake Hubby helped me brush it in.  We worked to complete the patio enough to use it that evening for dinner with two friends.  We warned them they may sink in, and they offered to keep moving their chairs to help compact it!  

After some reading – water is the simplest way to compact it so we sprayed water on it and added more granite.  They waited for rain of the week.  I keep adding where its needed and its been weeks.

For the patio set, the flagstone & gravel, the pond liner, the pond heater, 2 solar mosquito zappers I just had to try…. Cost of our patio thus far is $621, with almost $240 of that in the 77 bags of pea gravel.  I will add in a few more bags of gravel that we’ll need for the pond, any fish and plants and give a final cost when this area is fully done for the year.

Still need a boarder, still need the pond… but were getting there…. Just keep going… JustRUNt.