Back To The (Rock) Drawing Board

Whoa, it's Friday already! I love short weeks that just fly by, even though it usually means I accomplished less than I normally would.

After the back breaking manual labor all last weekend, we had to take a couple of days off to rest. But Wednesday night we went in search of ground cover options for our fire pit area, and last night we tried out some samples.

And they were all sort of a fail.

(From left to right: Multipurpose Decorative Gravel, Pea Gravel and Lava Rock. Also, we still need to pick up our huge pile of roots behind the retaining wall.)

The bags of decorative landscaping rock at Home Depot and Lowes are around $3.50 per bag, so we decided to just grab some to try out. We were really hoping that one of these three would work as the ground cover for our fire pit area since they're all fire safe, relatively inexpensive, it's really easy to unload the bags from the trunk of the car and straight into the wheelbarrow, and because it's just from the hardware store, we could always return extra bags or go back for more if we didn't buy the correct amount.

But basically we've got a Goldilocks and the Three Bears problem with the selection of test rocks, except we've yet to find out "just right." The the multipurpose gravel, well, it looked like regular grey gravel, the type you'd see in a driveway. Not nice enough for what we wanted. The pea gravel was way too light colored. We could see this little patch practically glowing at dusk all the way from our deck, and just stood out way too much for the natural look we wanted. And while the lava rock was a more neutral color, which we liked, I think it would just look a little weird and out of place to have a 12 foot fire pit terrace covered in it. At least the bag of lava rock it was light weight though, which our still sore backs appreciated!

So tomorrow it will be back to the drawing board, looking for more rock options. The only options we didn't try from the hardware store were too-large river rock and too-white marble chips, so we're going to have to venture back to the inconvenient landscape supply yards. We were hoping to avoid getting rocks from a supply yard because other than the pros to bagged rock listed above, none of these supply yards have convenient open hours (most close at 4 or 5pm, so we couldn't go during the week), we would have to have the rocks delivered and deal with the hassle and wait time of that, since we can't transport non-bagged rock in our car, they're going to just dump the pile of rocks in our driveway and we'll have to shovel it into our wheelbarrow, making more work for ourselves, and if we don't figure out the right amount we need, we'll either be stuck with an extra pile of rocks blocking our driveway, or have to have them deliver more.

So it's a pain in the ass, but we've just got to suck it up and do it. Our mantras with all of our house projects is to "do it right," and "good enough isn't good enough." So while yes, our test rock options would have worked, we don't want to settle on something that won't make us 100% happy. Even if it's a whole lot more work to find the perfect solution.

Do you ever force yourself to deal with inconveniences, in the name of doing something right the first time?

 

Memorial Day Weekend in Photos (Fire Pit Progress)

Hope everyone had a very nice long weekend! Here's what we were up to.

Friday afternoon: two pallets of supplies were delivered.

Friday evening: trench digging.

Lower 18 foot long by 12 inch wide by 5 inches deep trench complete.

Saturday morning: filling the lower trench with paver base material and painstakingly leveling the bottom layer of paver stones.

Friday afternoon: making progress on the lower retaining wall

Installing the drainage tube.

Our supervisor.

Saturday evening: adding drainage gravel behind the retaining wall.

More checking to make sure things are still level.

Sunday morning: before we started working, this was as far as we got Saturday, with the lower retaining wall completed, but still needing to add more gravel and dirt to raise the terrace area up.

Saturday all day: digging and shoveling, transferring the dirt from the higher side to the lower side.

So many tree roots to battle, making the digging go even slower.

Saturday afternoon: still digging. Oh my god, so much digging.

Saturday night: forced to stop early at 7:30 because of rain.

Monday morning: still had to dig out the upper trench, lay the paver base and level everything.

Monday mid-day: the upper wall is starting to come together.

More drainage gravel.

Monday at 3pm: we run out of paver stones, with 1 1/2 levels left to go. We call it quits, because family is coming over for dinner at 5pm. Can barely walk or lift our arms.

Our new chairs and cute pillows we bought for the fire pit area, once it's actually finished. We used them on the deck instead.

Biggest marshmallows I've ever seen. Which we didn't get to eat. :( We considered trying to do a fire even though the terrace area isn't finished yet, but my BIL wasn't feeling very well, so they ended up leaving early, not too long after dinner. Oh well, the marshmallows will still be good next weekend once we're all finished and ready for a fire!

Still left to do to complete our fire pit area:

• Buy and install the last 1 1/2 layers of paver stones on the upper retaining wall
• Back fill the upper wall with gravel and dirt
• Put in a ground cover of either decorative pebbles or beauty bark (eventually we may end up doing a full patio with more paver stones, but that would require more digging and a wet saw to cut the stones, and just a whole lot more work than we're up for at the moment. So that will come in a later phase. Although we have a feeling we may end up liking a more natural feel for the terrace area between the retaining walls. We'll see though!)
• Make a side table out of a tree stump
• Put in some potting soil above the upper retaining wall and plant a few shade-friendly plants (maybe ferns, azaleas or hosta)
• Finish building up the path down to the fire pit
• Install landscape lighting along the path
• Put the fire pit in the center of the terrace area
• Arrange new chairs around the fire pit
• Bring down some citronella candles
• Have a fire already!

How was your Memorial Day weekend? I feel like I need another weekend just to recover from this weekend!

P.S. I'll be doing a full breakdown on the building of the retaining walls and fire pit area with more details, links to online resources we found useful, and of course the cost. I just want to finish this phase of the project first, before I add up all of the receipts!

Lightning Bug Flash

While cleaning up my desktop files earlier this week, I came across this little 8 second video I took last year, but never shared.

Before moving to North Carolina, I'd never seen a firefly before (or lightning bug, as they're called in the south). I was fascinated by them, and just like a little kid, I just had to catch one in a jar to see it up close.

If you've never seen one either, here's what they look like when they flash.


(don't worry, I released this little guy outside right after filming him)

The lighting bugs are just starting to come out for the season, and it's so neat to sit on our deck after sunset to watch for the little flashes between the trees. I'm sure we'll be doing some of that this weekend, while we rest in the evenings after long days of hauling paver stones around to build our fire pit area!

Hope you all have a great Memorial Day weekend. Hopefully I'll be back next week with the good news that our fire pit is finished, and we got to enjoy it Monday evening, but we'll see!

Avo-cow-do Dip

After all of our hard work on Saturday, we were in need of a snack. My husband sort of felt like having cheese and crackers, but I was in the mood for guacamole, although I didn't feel like going to all the effort to making guac from scratch.

So Avo-cow-do Dip was born!

Avo-cow-do Dip
Makes 4 servings, 62.1 calories per serving

• 1/3rd of an avocado
• 2 wedges of Laughing Cow Garlic and Herb cheese
• 2 slices of bacon (we used Hormel Microwave Ready Bacon)
• garlic salt and pepper to taste
• a few drops of sriracha sauce (optional)

Mash avocado and Laughing Cow wedges together in a bowl with a fork. Cook bacon and crumple it in the bowl. Stir in as much garlic salt, pepper and sriracha as you like. Serve with chips or crackers (we ate it with Whole Wheat Ritz). 

So creamy and avocado-y, with little crunches of bacon and a slight spicy taste from the sriracha. And so quick and easy to make. I have a feeling this dip will be making a reappearance in our house again soon!

Have you ever made up a dip recipe?

{Weekend Recap} Fire Pit Prepping

Well, we had a very productive weekend! We spent both days prepping for our big Memorial Day Weekend project: building two retaining walls and our fire pit area.

Saturday morning we were up early to check out the nearby garage sales (no luck though, since we were only looking for big furniture pieces that we could refinish). Then we visited two landscaping supply yards and a garden center, looking at paver stone options for our retaining walls. Unfortunately none of these places had very many options for pavers to build walls with a slight curve, mostly we found rectangular shaped pavers, and lots of flagstone and natural rocks. And their prices weren't really better than what we'd seen at Lowes the previous weekend.

But luckily we decided to try Home Depot, to see what their selection and prices looked like, and we found our pavers! They are a nice color blend of greys, reds and browns, so they will blend into the surrounding natural landscape really well, and they were only $1.18 each! We'd been budgeting for $2 pavers, and even though these are slightly smaller, so we need to use more (only 3 inches high, instead of 4), it's still a savings over what we found at the stone yards and Lowes.

We bought 300 pavers, along with 10 bags of paver base, and 20 bags of small decorative rocks which will cover the finished fire pit area (although someday we may replace the decorative rocks with a paver stone patio, but that will be in phase 2 of the project, and we have a feeling we may end up liking the more natural rock surface even more than we would a patio.).

Thank goodness Home Depot offers delivery, because it would have been a whole lot of trips in our cars to get all of that home! We considered renting a truck from Home Depot for $20 and hauling the supplies home ourselves, but that $20 only gets you an hour and a half rental. Trying to race against the clock to unload 300 pavers and all of the other bags wasn't our idea of a good time, so we spent $39 more than the truck rental cost for the luxury of having everything delivered and unloaded next to our house this Friday. Gotta save our muscles for hauling those pavers down the slope and installing them next weekend!

By mid day Saturday we were already feeling really good about all we'd accomplished (buying stuff! It's really happening, my dream of having my own fire pit is going to finally come true!), but we still had a lot more to do to prep for the install.

Last weekend we'd marked off the 12 foot diameter circle we wanted the fire pit area to span, and next it was time to mark off where the retaining walls on either side would go. You can sort of see the white rope lines in the below photo. In this photo, you'll also notice two small trees between the white rope. Yep, getting rid of those was on our afternoon agenda!

We used the same saw that my husband used to take down the post and railing in our nook area, with me applying a bit of pressure on the trees to ensure they fell the correct direction. The smaller one was pretty easy, but for the larger one my husband first cut a notch into the tree on the side we wanted it to fall, to further help it go down in the direction we intended.

The fallen trees then go cut up. I cut off the leafy branches and dragged them to our yard debris pile, while my husband used the saw to cut the trunks into fire pit sized logs.

We left a good amount of the tree stumps, to give us leverage to work with when it comes time to dig out the roots. And we may have a fun use for the larger of the stumps, which I'll get into in a future post if it ends up working out.

The cut up trees, drying on a tarp in the corner of our garage. We need to get or make some kind of wood pile/wood shed for a long term solution!

Sunday morning it was time for yet another trip to the hardware store, to get more supplies for next weekend. We picked up a wheelbarrow, and 10 bags of drainage gravel.

Some drainage tubes, which will get packed in place on the back side of our retaining walls with the gravel, to help with water drainage behind the walls.

Some construction adhesive, which will hold the stacked paver stones in place.



And we also added a tamper to our ever-growing tool collection, to pack down the dirt and paver base.

Once we got the wheelbarrow assembled, it was time to put it to use with clearing a trail down to our fire pit area. We are eventually going to put in sod (and cut down some more trees) closer to our house, where the ground is much more level. So we started our path down to the fire pit where the slope begins, and where the edge of our grass will come up to someday.

First we had to rake all of the leaves to the side, so you can start to see where the path will go.

Then, to level things out, we used a shovel to dig up dirt from the higher side of the path, and smoothed it and tamped it down over the lower side of the path.

(I totally love that our path is curving down the slope and through a break in a fallen tree!)

 

We definitely have a lot more to do on just the path itself, like defining the edges with larger rocks and filling the path with either decorative rocks or bark and adding some landscape lighting along the edge to light the path at night. But since next weekend we will be taking many, many trips down the path with the wheelbarrow full of heavy stones, we know it's going to get torn up a bit. We'll come back and finish the path off later, once we're done with the retaining walls and fire pit area. Building a level path down a slope is a whole lot harder than it looks, so for now, we're happy that it's good enough to take the wheelbarrow down it and walk down it without tripping over rocks and roots!

When leveling out our path down to the fire pit, we also had the chance to dig a little in the area that will be excavated next weekend, to use some of the dirt to build up our path.

For the fire pit area, we're using the same principal as we did with the path. After building up the lower retaining wall to the mid point slope height in the area we're working with, we will dig out the dirt from the higher side of the slope, remove the roots and rocks, and transplant it to the lower side of the slope, to back fill the area up about as high as the lower retaining wall, and then we'll build the upper retaining wall. This will mean we're only building two ~2 foot high retaining walls, instead of one much larger retaining wall on the higher side, and also means less digging. So far, so good on the test digging front though--there's some roots and some rocks, but it's a nice clay dirt that isn't very hard to penetrate with our shovel. Fingers crossed it stays that way as we continue to dig next weekend!

Did you have a productive weekend too? Make any hardware store trips or cut down any trees? I can definitely say (and my husband agrees) that our idea of a good weekend has definitely changed since we became homeowners. Relaxing used to be the name of the game on weekends, and now it's accomplishing as much home stuff as we can that defines a good weekend!