Tomorrow i am starting a massive project in my pitiful excuse for a back yard.
The entire yard is only about 20ft long by about 8ft wide, it serves as a good place to take the dog for his business in the wee hours of the morning, and the patio is but a 6x8 ft concrete speck.
I feel like by sprucing it up and making it a nice place, my wife and I might spend more time out there in the mornings for a cup of coffee and perhaps a bit of breakfast... and i would certainly have a more relaxing space to enjoy a drink or a cigar or maybe a nice steak dinner once in a while with company.
I will be taking down the entire fence, and rebuilding that. I have precisely laid out plans, and all the right equipment i will need. I plan to use Cedar, not only for its pleasant smell, but it is naturally resistant to bugs and rot, and -i am told - it will age to a nice silvery color.
but the bigger project at least in my opinion is the patio.
You see, currently the concrete pad that serves as our "patio" is nothing but a place to stand really, and as a result we spend no time out there.
the yard... grass has
never flourished in the back yard, and seeing that it is so small, i had considered getting some flag stone, excavating about six inches down, laying a bed of gravel, topping off with crushed stone or sand and laying the flag stone on top of that then filling in the spaces with more crush stone/sand - thereby making the entire 20x8 area a big flag stone patio. The whole stone patio will be surrounded by metal or rubber garden edging
three problems with this patio scenario that i have considered:
1. it eliminates the convenient place for the dog to go do his business, so these 2am trips to the crapper will involve putting on some decent shorts and slippers, leashing the dog and taking him outside where numerous distractions will turn a 30 second trip into a 3 or 4 minute trip
2. Though i have built my fair share of fence, I have never undertaken a stone laying project though it sounds straight forward based on my research, i cannot afford inexperience to screw the whole back yard up.
3. 160 square feet of flag stone wont be cheap... i think that stuff is currently priced about $4.35/sqft so i would be looking at dropping about $700 into the stone project alone and thats before i purchased any sand or gravel!
note: this will involve unscrewing and capping two or three sprinkler heads, also the ground is very firm lending itself to stone patio work.
the other option is to do about
half of the yard in stone, and try to transplant grass into the rest of the yard. transplanting is all i havnt done yet. (i planted seed last spring and it did well but it just didnt last.)
Im leaning in this direction because the cons on stoning the whole
yard are too great.
1. by doing half the yard, the dog still has a good 10+ by 8 ft area to do his business when we don't feel like leashing him.
2. doing half the yard is a much smaller project making it less expensive, more manageable and less time consuming.
i think the grass seed may have done better last year if i had excavated the top soil and replaced it. but re-seeding or transplanting the yard really seems like a job for the spring time.
so, the purpose of this post, is to throw this out there at the last minute and see if anyone has ideas i havn't come up with yet.
