We've been describing laying the flagstones for the patio as "building a jigsaw puzzle, only there's no picture on the front of the box, all the pieces are the same color, and none of them actually fit together." It turned out to be exactly like that.

Dana and I hit the, well, not bricks. Rocks I guess. Rocks early and started laying the flagstones for the patio. With only one short break in the morning when my Mom and brother stopped by and a slightly longer one at lunch time, we laid the whole patio by 4:00 p.m.

It looks surprisingly good.

We've decided now that we have the patio we're pretty much committed to building the entire deck. The patio by itself looks pretty silly.

Today's installment of "the patio from heck" went in two parts.

First, in the morning I went to Rockman and got another truckload of 5/8-minus gravel. The lady there puts a serious load on your truck.

Then I took Joey to Lake Tye where we had a baseball game. I called the game from behind the plate -- the other team's fans didn't think much of my low strike calls, but there you go.

In the afternoon I started putting gravel in the hole. Took most of the truckload but I finally had the whole patio area filled to 3 inches below the grass. There must be 8 inches of gravel in some places, but no one will ever be able to say I didn't put enough rock under it.

Today was a beautiful day. Too beautiful to stay indoors at work. But I did anyway.

But as soon as I got home Dana met me at the door and said all your tools are waiting for you, so I headed out and started cutting sod away from the area where the patio will go.

The sod cutting and digging went quickly since we were only doing a few square feet, then I used the rest of the gravel that I had on hand to backfill the hole. Unfortunately the gravel I had on hand only filled the new area, there wasn't enough left over to bring the whole patio area up the two inches that we need. That will have to wait for our next chance to work on the project.

This week we started working on our new deck and patio in earnest. We've always planned a deck on the side of the house off the dining room, we just couldn't afford to put one in after building the house. Instead, we put a gravel pad on the side of the house where we wanted the patio to go.

On Wednesday I used the tractor, a rake and a shovel to remove the gravel from the pad. On Saturday we started digging out the dirt to put the gravel base in for the patio section. 

I guess I should explain a little. We're putting in a 20x20 deck, but the 8x8 northwest corner is going to be a flagstone patio instead of a deck. Dana saw something like it on DIY Network, so we're using the idea. After we get the patio section in, we'll put the deck over the top of the inside corner with a step down to the patio. Our firepit will go on the patio so we don't inadvertantly burn the house down.

Anyway, we dug out the corner, piling the dirt up over by the compost bins, then backfilled with the gravel from the rest of the pad. When that ran out we went to Rockman here in town to get a pickup-load of gravel. Everything looked great, we went out and bought sand and edging and even a couple of rubber hammers to pound the stones with to settle them.

On Sunday we found the a stone that we liked at a place in Clearview off Highway 9. It's a stone that they call "Cowboy Coffee," but that's a color name, I'm not sure what the actual stone type is. Probably a Kentucky bluestone, it looks like that to me.  Anyway, we bought jsut over a ton. Then loaded it into the truck and hauled it home. Then unloaded it. That was about it for our Sunday.

And then I realized I wanted to put a curve on the outside edge. 

The edging helped me make a nice fair curve, but it meant we needed to do some more digging.