Score!

Look what we brought home today.

You are looking at a huge pile of bricks and pavers (same pile, two different views). It took two van trips with all the benches out to get them home. What I thought was going to be a simple hour or so job turned into a four hour, back breaking extravaganza of brick toting. And the best part? They were free!

Now you're probably wondering what we are going to do with all of this. Well, for quite some time we have been thinking we wanted to build a brick patio in the former garbage dump that we inherited.

It's a little hard to see, but it is the space directly between the shed and the trampoline where there is little grass. When we first moved in, this space was terribly overgrown with weedy trees and six foot tall weeds. Even better, there were paint and oil cans dumped there as well as random other garbage and debris. It's taken us this long just to clear it out. With the oil and paint that leaked, it is not a good gardening space, but it would make a perfect patio area. I would always look at pavers at our local home store and realize that this was not a plan which would be happening anytime soon. One or two of the things aren't expensive, but it adds up quickly. 

But now we have the hard material! It was totally worth the extremely sore back I will probably wake up with in the morning. Our next challenge, though, is how to level it. If it were just dirt it would be easy. Well, as easy as shoveling heavy dirt is. But remember I mentioned it had weed trees? They have proven nearly impossible to dig the stumps out by hand, and we can't even the surface until they are gone. Once again, J. wistfully says, "If only I had a skid... " We will probably end up having to hire someone with the appropriate machinery to come and level it for us. I'm not going to think about that right now, I'm just going to admire my lovely pile of bricks and pavers for the moment.