Stone Terrace

This next project was different than any over the past year in that our first move wasn’t to make more of a mess.  Someone had already done that for us!  Marcus and Pat are remodeling their new home in Broadmoor, and for this year, they just want to have a nice dining patio and a safe set of steps leading to the back yard.  (Next year they intend to show Broadmoor how to maintain a beautiful urban vegetable garden.)

This is the space off the kitchen and dining room.  A pretty straight forward project compared to many that we build, with one little exception; Marcus and Pat were in Europe during the entire project.  For many reasons, this is really no big deal for us.  But for one huge reason, we were in trouble.  How could we be sure that Marcus and Pat would be delighted if they aren’t around to guide and contribute to the process?  Fortunately, the day before they left town we went to Lakeview Stone and Marenakos Stone together and selected much of the bluestone for the patio.  The rest of the plan was to use technology to communicate regularly.

So we formed and poured the rat slab for the stone patio.

This guy from Pacific Concrete Pumping can bring it!  He has been a huge help on the last few pours.  It is the only photo I have of the concrete pour because once the mud started coming out of the hose, it was game time and the camera had to be put away.

Though it may look like Victor, Fraser and Ben are just standing around doing nothing, sometimes they actually get some work done.  Actually, I’m surprised to see them all standing together.  It must be the ‘plan of attack’ talk about the stone layout.  The plan:  layout the stone in a way that looks good to us.  Then do it again.  And again.  Take photos, post them to flickr, then talk with Marcus and Pat via phone.  We all liked the layout below:

So we got confirmation on the layout, decided that the remainder of the design layout would be entrusted to me, and now it was just a matter of installation.

 

Let’s check in on Ben and the replacement of the steps to the back yard proper.

I’ll stop the post here.  What a cliffhanger!