What We Do For Fun

I occurred to me that a stipulation for us being on this year's garden tour was that we get the deck redone as a lovely terrace. Let's face it: you can garden until the cows come home, but if the back of the house looks like Shanty Town, then none of it is worth the effort. I knew we had no time to replace the deck entirely and I was even debating dragging one of the carpets out of the house to disguise the rotting deck and aspiring plant life housed there in, when the most excellent solution presented itself. Why not simply tear up the disintegrating boards and replace them with gravel?
I can't believe that Bob actually agreed- and agreed that it was a good idea- because the gravel is really a step in the final master plan of a cement and stone terrace. So we're just replacing the deck in stages. Tuesday was set aside as Terrace Construction Day. As you can see, Robin helped with Stage One: the tearing up of the boards.
This part was relatively easy and sort of fun. We crowbarred and maddox'ed the old boards out and soon had an empty site.

Here, Robin and I admire the (mostly) removed deck on our way into lunch. The next stage (Stage 2)was to dig out a layer of dirt so that the level of the gravel was below the sliding door. This part nearly killed me! It was incredibly humid and the dirt was very compacted (a full of small stones) and needed to be wheel-barrowed down to Bob's studio. It was heavy and dirty and we were sweating like pigs. But we got it done and with an eye on the clock (as we had a dinner engagement) we proceeded to Stage 3. This is where I realized that Bob and I would do just fine on a chain gang, as we shoveled a half ton of gravel off the truck and onto the deck area.

Oooooohhh! It was heavy and our shoulders and backs and bodies were killing us, but all that work paid off and it looks great! Nice and neat and clean and beige and no weeds or weird gaps...
it made the terrace area look like a terrace. And done just in time to shower and go to dinner!

The ultimate finished stone and cement terrace will expand to the whole width of the house, but as a quick (relatively) fix, it was a good solution. I'll post pictures tomorrow of the chairs and pots of flowers back in place on the terrace; it looks terrific! Also, pay attention to the left hand section of the sliding door frame. Bob did a super fix of that today...