Here are pictures of my new terrace, built during about three weeks in May and June 2003. I'm pretty proud of this, as I had never laid paving stones before. The area had been covered by about six inches of red lava rock, with a wobbly stepping stone walk to the breakfast room door. First I had to haul away the gravel, a wheelbarrow load at a time. Working only two or three hours a day (in the mornings, before it got too hot), I took a week just to clear out the gravel, which I put in other places in my front and back yards where the gravel had been rather thin. It sure isn't any more! The ground underneath was very uneven, so I did some hand scraping and then used 15 half-cubic foot bags of sand to level it (roughly; from the pictures you can see it still undulates a bit). Then I hauled in the stones a barrow full at a time. I could get 18 rectangles and 9 squares in one load. For another week I was laying stones. The last week, I cleaned up, swept sand into the interstices between stones, and then had Home Depot come and pick up about 225 stones and 11 bags of sand that I had left over. Yes, I the mathematician made an arithmetic mistake and ordered way too many. But, here is the result.
Here is the Terrace looking towards the breakfast room door from the front entryway. See my nice roses and the Japanese maple? The pillars and beams were there when we moved in; I installed the 1X2 lattice roof last summer to cut the heat.
Here is the terrace as seen from the breakfast room door. As you can see, it is very secluded. A nice place to sit and sip mint juleps of a summer evening. You can see some more of my roses (these were new this year) over by Marilynn's sewing room window. Our little table and chair are barely visible behind the leaves of the Japanese maple. You can catch a glimpse of Josef between the pillars.
I couldn't resist including this one. There's our mental giant hunter dog Josef over there with his head in the bushes, tail going like crazy, hunting the wily lizard. As you can see, the wily lizard is way ahead of him. Thank goodness he's not much of a hunter, because the lizards do eat a lot of bugs.
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