jayneandmarty.com

We spent Saturday and Sunday of the long weekend finishing off the patio/paved/outdoor table and chairs area that we started in April (first post here, second post here).

On Saturday we hired a compactor to bed down the road base and sand that we’d already laid. We should have compacted the road base before laying the sand but we only found that out afterwards. Didn’t matter, no harm done, it was only 1/2 a metre of sand and it compacted nicely into the road base.

Then on Saturday arvo we had another metre of sand to move from the driveway (it had been there since before our holiday) and subsequently compact down, which I did with a hand-compactor that we either inherited from the previous owners or from Jayne’s Dad’s toolkit, as I’d never seen it before. It looks like it was made from two pieces of railway track and a gangland crowbar and it weighs about 20kg.

By Saturday evening I was hurting but I was determined to finish by COB Sunday.

On Sunday we slept in a bit, which didn’t help, but after two tedious hours of screeing off, as I think it’s called, we were ready to lay the bricks.

Look at that. Flat as a tack and ready for bricking.

We had two big, neatly-stacked piles of bricks reclaimed from elsewhere in the garden that I was sure would be enough to cover the area, so I reckoned I’d be done by 2pm and all set for a beer and a bit of Sunday afternoon footy.

Then we got to about here …

… and ran out of bricks. So we had to find some. It was hilarious: Jayne kept going off to the bottom of the garden and returning with dozens of the things and I was doing the same from the front garden. Most of them were being used for garden edging and we planned to replace those with redgum sleepers anyway but a good number came from a path and others were from a set of steps down the side of the house.

All was going well but by around 3pm we were sick of it. We still had around 1/4 of the area to complete and 10 hours of bending and lifting bricks was taking its toll on our early-to-mid-30s bodies. I probably sound like I’m having a whinge but I’m here to tell you that it’s Wednesday night now and I still can’t walk properly.

Anyway. We did it. We were almost as knackered as when we rode our bikes from Beechworth to Bright in one day (65km) but we did it.

To finish off we’ll fill the edges with 7mm gravel and plant nice leafy things around it. Then we can move the outdoor table and benches back onto it and have a barbie to celebrate.