Raw Muscle Required

If anyone is interested in helping a Pooka with hot-sweaty-muscle guy work tomorrow, you're more than welcome to join the chaos.

They took me to get my Mother's Day present. With a limited budget, I put back so many flowers, so many hanging baskets, so many little 6 paks of them. Dammit. It just wasn't right.

Then we found the paving stones at Home Depot. They aren't what I wanted. I admit that up front. But they don't clash with the house brick like the ones at Walmart, and were cheaper.

We DID find the exact ones I wanted, the large irregular "natural" rock pavers and they were HUGE, but they were also 5 bucks each. Uh. No.

So we picked up paver sand, and 16 12x12 "pewter" (ie, natural concrete colour that matches the porch slab) concrete slabs that cost less than a dollar each. It doesn't sound like enough for the area, but we do have several large natural stones, and the longer rectangular concrete slabs left in the yard that we already put in that space. With what we already have, and spreading them some to be able to put Alyssum and some other flowering groundcover in there, they'll be perfect.

I'm not really going for a regular stepping/seating/standing place with this extension. You'll be able to walk on the stones, but it's more to move some of the planters out of the way on the actual slab so DG doesn't maim and scorch my plants with his blasted grill.

It's hot enough out there without some fool with lighter fluid starting a bonfire three feet from my tomato plants.

My largest pot is almost big enough to stuff my 10 year old in, but the base should fit with little problem on a slab.

So, tomorrow we put down another layer of black plastic and pull more sticker burrs and grass to finish the size of the area, get sand down to help level the area and provide a cushion base for the paving stones, figure out spacing (I'll be putting larger dirt sections where I want flowering groundcover around the natural stones that we have), and try to get everything set and down.

We found an outdoor porch swing that's FABULOUS, but $100 was a smoodge out of our budget, okay, SCADS out of our budget. But it had a very large canopy, two separate seats with drink holders and a little shelf and basket between them. Very nice.

It may not be a romantic girly Mother's Day, but I'm happy.

All I need now is my patio cover. At this point, gimme a couple of PVC pipes and I'll sew up the pavillion fabric still sitting in our garage with grommets and velcro to attach around the pipes, and I'll call it done. It's friggin hot out there, man.