My Soon-To-Be Future Husband, I Mean Patio.

So did you know that I HATE my back yard?  I don't just dislike it.  I absolutely effing despise it.  When I bought the house, I ordered 2 water hookups- one on each side of the house.  Well, it seems they forgot about the 2nd one and of course you can't tell that until the slab is poured and the walls are up.  As you can imagine- I was pretty shitty.

I have a very large yard since I sit on a corner lot.  When they laid the sod at the end of August, they were constantly watering it and forgot about the seed that they half-assedly tossed around the back yard.  And yes, half-assedly is a real word.  Look it up.

So needless to say, the back yard is either a mud pit or a weed infested mess.  It's quite comical when I have to venture out to mow it.  My lawn mower looks like it's riding a roller coaster and my hands get tore up with blisters from trying to contain it.  Have I said yet how much I hate it?

I've always planned on putting a patio out there so I didn't want to till it and put down sod if I was just going to rip it up again.  So it's stayed the hot mess of the neighborhood.  Well two summers ago I had a few companies come out to give me an estimate for a stamped concrete patio- which was what I wanted to do.  For the size that I was looking for, it was going to be between $5,000-6,000 and the kicker- they only take cash or check.  Whomp whomp.  I mean, I may be loaded.  But I'm not that kind of loaded.  (I'm not loaded at all, by the way if you are now planning on robbing me.)

So I told myself that I'd save for a year so that I could do it the next summer.  Well, two summers later and this mama STILL hasn't saved enough to pay cash for it.  At the end of last summer I finally just decided to do a paver patio instead of the solid concrete one.  Not only is it a big difference in looks, it's a big difference in cost as well.  Oh- and it's a HUGE difference in manual labor as well- and NOT in my favor.  With the concrete patio, the company would do everything- dig and pour.  For a paver patio, it'd be all on my dad me.  I really debated was the $4,000 difference worth breaking backs and every muscle in your body being sore?  But the more I thought about it, the more a paver patio made sense to me.  I mean, I'm not going to lie.  It's all about the money in the end.  I don't have extra thousands of dollars just waiting around in my bank account to be spent on a patio.  And this wouldn't be a DIY blog if I didn't love to do things the hard way, now would it?

Well yesterday I bit the bullet and bought the pavers.  This project won't get done until mid-end of July but they were on-sale from $3.69 each to $2.25- which when you are buying 265 of them that is a savings of $381+.  The paver is 16 X 16 and 2 inches deep.  I wanted to go with a bigger paver because it's less likely to shift/move and has a smaller amount of joints for weeds to eventually come through.  This paver is pretty cool because you can make a couple of different designs with it.  This is what it looks like:

It's called a Quarter Turned Cobblestone paver.  The quarter turn part is significant here people.  Because if you take another paver, turn it 90 degrees and butt it up to the first, you now have a half circle.

Cool huh?  Now if you take 4 pavers, you can get a full circle- that you can see in the middle of the below photo.

My plan right now is to have all of it done with the full circles, not the half circles.  But I guess we can play around with it once we get a few down if I'm not feeling it.  And you know me- super anal, OCD, whatever you want to call me.  I totally plotted this out prior to going to purchase the pavers.  Clearly by my paper of choice you can tell it isn't to scale.  But it'll give you an idea of the size I'm going for.  All 460 sq ft of it.

And for you more visual people, here it is with the circles lightly sketched in.  

Now if ONLY July would get here tomorrow!!!  I am so excited about getting this done and having some margaritas on my chaise lounges that have been in my garage for 2 years now.  

Oh- and I also have plans to build some patio furniture for it as well, but I need to get the patio done first to determine the size of it.  I won't spill the details on that yet but it's going to be awesome (if I can pull it off!).  

So if anyone wants to help dig out a 460 sq ft patio in the hottest month of the year, I'll totally supply the beer and pizza.  The more the merrier!!!  You in???