Feline Mafia

I'm not sure what possessed me to redo my patio this year. It probably had something to do with wanting to get rid of the weeds growing up between the pavers. I'm sure that's it. Wanting not to be attacked by weeds (or possibly critters) when I sat in my yard. I had this vision of a clear area where I could have a table and chairs, a grill, and my portable firepit, and enjoy sitting and reading, or having dinner with friends, and not have to worry that the fire would set anything else ablaze. Pull up those pavers, put down some new fill dirt, and put the old pavers back. Minimum amounts of work required when compared to Clay's patio area. His involved excavating and gravel delivery and slave labor (step-children) to finish. Mine seemed like a piece of cake.

The first thing had to be fill dirt. Where does one find it? Being too lazy to look stuff up in the phonebook, I called Clay. As it turned out, having had to do some major excavation to do his own patio, he had some he needed to get rid of. Win-win. Neither of us owning a truck, we called our friend Mort. His name is actually Jim. Having known several "Jims" at the same time, they'd each gotten a nickname derived from their last name. Hence: Mort. Or Mortie. I can get away with calling him that because I'm a girl. As long as I don't abuse the privilege. (The other Jim we know has somehow just become "Jim" over the years, by unspoken accord. I suspect we all got uncomfortable with calling a former Marine by a childhood nickname. In case you're wondering, I DID recently ask if Mort would prefer I not call him that anymore. He's OK with it.) So, Mort, being the proud owner of a full-sized truck, got dragooned into helping us move dirt.

About a week before the scheduled dirt-moving day, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to have somewhere to put said dirt that wasn't going to kill a large patch of my lawn and that would be convenient to the patio area. I needed to start moving pavers. Then I could just dump it where it already needed to be! So I got started. This is where I began to realize the job was going to be a lot more difficult than I had first thought. The pavers are 12" square and weigh about 10lbs each. (I suspect more, but never weighed them. I didn't want to say they were 15 or 20 lbs and be called out by Clay for exaggerating. They certainly FELT like 15 or 20 lbs.) Ten pounds doesn't sound like much, until you realize each is embedded in the ground and needs to be pried up and carried off to one side in preparation for putting them back eventually. And, there are about 100 of them. Still not sounding difficult? Maybe not for you, but I'm mid-thirties, mildly overweight, and haven't been exercising much in the last decade. I got the first 3 rows moved (putting each row in its own stack so they could go right back where they came from. Yeah. More on that later.), and decided that that was good enough for 2 days work and made plenty of room for the dumping of fill dirt.

At an ungodly early hour that Saturday (7:30 IS ungodly early when you don't have to be to work and you like sleeping in),I headed over to Clay's with long-sleeved shirt, floppy wide-brimmed hat (I'm mildly sun allergic), and heavy gloves (Protecting the hands is important). Plus the shovel. Mort showed up a little bit later (making me grumble to myself, but you don't grouch at people who are helping you do unpleasant manual labor). He and Clay got to work removing the cover from the bed of Mort's truck. Clay's wife and I stood watching with folded arms and heads tilted to one side. (Odd. Apparently it's a woman thing.) When they went to set the cover down on the lawn, we both said jokingly, "I think it needs to go to the right." Chuckling, the two obliged and moved it about 6 inches to the right. Of course, at this point, we both said, "No...back to the left a bit." I guess it wasn't as funny the second time, since they didn't move it again.

I went and got my stuff out of my trunk. Mort realized he'd forgotten to bring a shovel. Clay says it's not a problem as he has two. "Wait a minute," I said, "if I'd forgotten to bring mine, I could have pretended to be too delicate for this?" The both laugh. It's flattering to be though of as capable, but at the same time, not. I'm a girl! I'm not supposed to have to do this stuff! Guess I should have thought about that in my early twenties when I went around protesting indignantly that I was perfectly capable of doing it myself, thank you very much! Ah, well, live and learn. And I couldn't have just stood around while other people did it for me, anyway. Still, it would have been nice to hear a token, "No, let us take care of it."

Shoveling dirt, even in spring when it's not too dry yet, is...well...a dirty, gritty job. You work up a sweat (this is ok in moderation, but not to THIS degree) and get dirt in your eyes. And everywhere else, for that matter. We got the first load in, and drove it over to my house where we proceeded to unload it around the foundation. Settling foundation taken care of, we dumped the rest in the narrow space I'd freed up on the patio area. Then we went and loaded up again. This entire load went on the patio. We decided we were done for the day at that point. We were tired, dirty, and it was starting to get hot. I offered to buy lunch. They declined. I guess they'd rather spend time with their wives than use up more of a free Saturday with me. Understandable.

Looking at the pile of fill dirt on my patio, I started thinking that it might not be enough. So, we scheduled to do the same thing the next weekend. Complete with me moving more pavers to free up the room required (annoyed and swearing the whole time). I ended up having to work that saturday morning. I figured it wouldn't be a problem as I'd be done at noon. We could just do it in the afternoon. The guys decided that they didn't want to move dirt while the day was getting hot, so they started without me. When I called on my way home from work to see where we were in the scheme of things, I was informed that they were already done. Sweet! Them having lives worked out well for me in this instance. (Seriously guys, thanks!)

Over the next couple of weeks, I worked at getting the rest of the pavers up. "Worked at" meaning a row here, a row there, trying not to overdo it as I worked back into shape. (Still not there, but still working at it.) Once all the pavers were up, there was a wait. Clay needed to finish his own yard before his step-son's Open House. (We're all getting old.) Once that was done, Clay came over to demonstrate "Screeding". Screeding is the process of leveling the work area and making sure it slopes slightly AWAY from the house. Otherwise, when it rains, water runs TOWARD the house. I imagine this is a problem even when you don't have a basement to flood. (More on that later, too.)

Clay came over on a saturday with two seven foot aluminum poles and a four-foot section of 2x4. (Here's where things get technical, if that sort of thing bores you.) Screeding goes like this: lay the two aluminum poles parallel to each other along the porposed area, with one end at the back of the house and the other at the foot of the patio area. Put a small mound of dirt under the house ends of the poles to elevate them slightly. Use a level to determine the appropriate amount of slope for the poles. This apparently should be "1/4 bubble" (where 1/4 of the air bubble in the level extends beyond one of the lines). Glancing at my level as he was laying it along the top of one of the poles, Clay suddenly exclaimed, "Bastards!" (This is our favorite word for people who are annoying us.) When I asked him what the problem was, he said, "They gave you an undersized bubble!" Huh. I'd never really paid attention to the bubble in the level, beyond the fact that it HAD one. Thinking about it, I could see where having a bubble that didn't fill the spaces between the two lines would be a problem on a project where tolerances were small. Like house building, for example. ("Why is the wall six inches shorter on the right than on the left?" "Undersized bubble in the level.") Never having done a lot of construction, (or any for that matter), it wasn't one of the things I'd looked for. If I ever wear this one out and find myself in need of a new level, it's one of the things I'll be sure to check. We figured out how to work around the problem and went on.

The next thing is to make sure the two poles are level with each other. Check. Then you cover the two poles with dirt. Thsi is where the 2x4 comes in. You slide it along the tops of the two poles and level the dirt to the desired depth. This is where the back-breaking part of the process really begins. Crouched over the two poles, plucking out rocks and filling tin the holes they leave, making sure not to leave any hand or footprints in the fill, sweat running into my eyes. It was at this point I decided that "Screeding" had been developed as some form of medieval torture and only later been discovered to be of use in the laying of patios. After learning how to do it, the process of screeding the entire patio area took another couple of weeks as I was having trouble convincing myself it was important enough to suffer through.

Screeding finally finished, it was time to get back to what i thought was going to be the easy part of the project: putting the pavers back. Clay suggested getting some string and stakes to put out and use as guides to be sure I had my rows straight. "You can't assume that the back of the house is square with the patio." (I should mention here that the patio is off the back of my garage, in a corner formed where the walls of the house and garage meet.) "So you can use a squared plus b squared equals c squared to make sure you get them laid out square."

"What does high school geometry have to do with this?" I asked. I'd forgotten as much math as possible the minute I graduated.

"It's the formula for a right triangle."

"Riiight..."

"If you have a right angle, then your corners are square and the lines will be parallel to each other," Clay explained in a tone suggesting he wondered if he was talking to an imbecile.

"Oh. What, in twelve years of friendship, has ever made you believe I can do square roots in my head?"

There was a sort of startled pause on the other end of the line as Clay grappled with the idea that someone might not be able to do square roots in their head. (I should mention, he was a physics major.) "Well...there's a trick to it. You can also use a 3-4-5 triangle."

"Huh?" I said intelligently.

"It comes from the formula for a right triangle. If you have two sticks, one three feet and one four feet long, and you put the ends together so they form an angle, then you move the opposite ends until they're five feet apart, you have a right angle."

"Ah." Yeah. I decided to eyeball it. If you look close, you can tell. Fortunately, not many people look closely.

Because of where the patio is, laying the pavers had to start in that interior corner. That's where the door out from the garage is. (There's a post elsewhere about the garage door. That was another story.) So I had to start from inside the garage, because, If you start from the foot of the patio, you might find that you're off when you get up to the wall, and that last paver won't fit. Then you'd have to start over. Starting from inside the garage meant moving the first dozen or so pavers from the back yard, around the front of the house, and into the garage through the main door. No problem. I loaded the first five or six pavers into my wheelbarrow and started around to the front of the house. Or tried. The wheelbarrow wouldn't roll. I didn't think I'd overloaded it as it was made for this sort of thing, but I removed half of the pavers and tried again. Still no luck. I discovered that my wheelbarrow had a flat tire. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to convince someone to fix a flat on your wheelbarrow? I ended up carrying them around the house one at a time, elbows clamped to my sides, forearms straight out in front holding the paver. (I was trying not to get TOO dirty. I AM a girl. Eventually, I gave up. I kinda had to if I was going to accomplish anything.) The requisite number of pavers having been moved, it was time to start putting them back into place.

There are no words for how tedious this is. It starts out OK. Put paver down, check to make sure it's level (with my substandard level), saet it with several sharp blows from the rubber mallet I bought just for this. (Deal with mallet rebounding into shoulder when you forgot to keep it under control. Ouch.) Put down next paver. (This is where it starts to get complicated.) Check to make sure it's level, both itself, and TO THE BRICK NEXT TO IT. Nope. It's lower than the last one you put down. Pick it back up. Put down more fill dirt. Level it. Put brick back down. Check it. Still not level. Pick brick back up. Add more fill dirt. Level it. Put brick back down. Check it. Now it's higher than the previous one. Pick brick back up. Remove fill dirt. Level it. Put brick back down. Check it. HA! LEVEL! Start over with the nest one. Repeat, ad nauseum.

Eventually, you start to get the hang of eyeballing when the fill's level and the appropriate height. The work aquires a kind of rhythm. Get to the end of a row and things have been going well. Decide to take a break and have a beer. Bask in the glow of accomplishment. Which is short-lived once you realize you've been working at this on and off for days and you're only about one quarter done. Have another beer. Sit down for a breather. Stare at patio. Wonder if hitting your best friend for agreeing that you could probably do this yourself is an over the top reaction. Decide it probably is. Have a second beer. Or is it third? Lost count. Debate about laying more pavers tonight now that you've rested a bit. Decide against it. Pick up tools and go in for a shower.

I did this whenever I had a free day for weeks. Some days I accomplished more, some less. Some days I got frustrated and quit before I got more than one brick properly placed. But then came the day that I put down the last one. YES! Success! (We'll totally not mention that over the weeks I did this, I forgot which order each of those carefully placed piles of pavers was supposed to go back down in. It wouldn't have been a big deal if some of the pavers hadn't been cut to accomodate the supports for an awning that no longer exists. A tree fell on it. So...the slots they cut don't match up any more. Oh, well. I suppose it doesn't look any funnier than it would if they did match up perfectly. After all, there are pointless slots cut in my pavers.) I called Clay the night I finished to share the fantastic news. He said, "So, you got the edging down and everything?" Edging? I was told there's this plastic edging that must go around the edges of the patio to keep the pavers from shifting. OK.

I go to the local do-it-yourself store. Sure enough, there's plastic edging just for this sort of thing. I look closely at it. It's slightly taller than the pavers are deep. Wonderful. There's going to be digging involved. I buy the edging. Before I can get the needed shallow trench dug, it rains. Not a big deal. It's an opportunity to see if the patio drains like it's supposed to. It doesn't. In fact, the water pools in the interior corner where the garage door and a window into the basement are. Maybe this isn't a problem. After I get the trench dug for the edging, it'll run right off the foot of the patio like it's supposed to. Not my fault I couldn't raise the patio above the level of the lawn like I wanted. I was prevented by the presence of that window I mentioned that goes into the basement. But the trench will fix it, I'm sure.

Yeah, not so much. When I checked the basement, the water that was still pooling in the corner and refusing to run off the end of the patio like it was supposed to, was coming into the basement through the wall. Nice. The next nice day, I was out pulling up pavers, adding more fill in that corner, and replacing the pavers. The good news is, the patio is now still low enough that water doesn't come in through the basement window, but hight enough that water doesn't pool there and come into my basement through the wall.

At the foot of the patio, I ended up excavating a little to put in some gravel and some normal-sized bricks to give it a little extra drainage. So far, so good. I kept myself going through this with the idea that it would be so nice to sit on my new patio in the summer evening. That had to be amended to "the fall evening". Now, it'll be next spring before it's complete with furniture. But it WILL be worth it when I have somelace nice to sit next year. And look at all the other work that needs to be done to make to make the yard a true pleasure to sit in...