I’m slacking off this month for sure. I need to get this kicked into gear soon or I’ll be cutting my quota close for the month. The good news is the smug site is now uploaded with material for this post and a couple more while I was at it. From my previous post, there was a foreshadowing of upcoming additions on new “operations” that were underway around the lot. Well, one of those particular tasks was a transformation of this particular part of the lot:
This is a shot of an area of my backyard that happened to be where the builders shoved all the brush and trees during the clearing for the house building phase (about 4 years ago). A lot of work went into getting it looking in this shape since all the trees were simply piled up with a dozer and excavator. It took about 3 months to systematically cut free the tree logs (on the right) and deal with the leftover brush it came from on the left. It reminded me of the old pickup-sticks game having to work my way through the mashed and twisted trees one exposed foot to the next with a chainsaw, loppers and a shovel. One of the reasons for all this work was the desire to put in a bonfire area. We put on an annual Halloween cookout party and enjoy starting a fire every once in awhile to roast some hot dogs and have some tasty s’mores (food of the gods by the way). For the first few years, I simply dug a fairly big hole in the ground and lined it with some of the large logs saved from the clearing pile. This worked great as long at the weather cooperated (fortunately, the grass finally came in), but the uneven ground wasn’t the ideal situation for chairs and standing around.
This brings us two about one month ago and more accurately, a Friday exactly 9 days before this year’s Halloween party. The night before my inner voice convinced me to do something to improve this particular area – knowing full well this voice always gets me into trouble by convincing me to take on tasks that have impossible time frames to deliver on. “Build it and they will come, build it and they will come” kept bouncing around in my head until I finally caved and decided to build a quick patio around the fire pit. How hard can it be, go to store, get large patio blocks, throw them into place and be done – one day tops! There is another thing my inner voice always does to me … LIE! Except for that time when it tried to convinced me to NOT do something on my skateboard (for the record a skateboard given to me by my brother) because I would likely smack headfirst into a concrete stoop… at that particular time it was actually telling the truth ..but alas, I ended up ignoring it and chalked up another visit to the emergency room. But I digress. I had already invested in a bunch of 16×16 concrete patio block to help shore up the ground under the bridge so decided to go ahead and just get more of that. I had a couple left over from that effort and figured if something went wrong I could use one of those. So Friday after work I cleaned up the area where I wanted the patio to go and made sure the area was mowed and trimmed up. I also tried to set the dimensions to get and estimate of the block count. The next morning bright and early I headed off to Menards in the Ram1500. The blocks were on sale but still came out to around $2.34 each. I went out and checked the yard to make sure they had enough and then went inside and placed an order for 30 16x16x3 concrete blocks. At the yard gate, I asked the attendant if he could get someone to lift the block palette up for easier loading.. A clerk eventually came, got the forklift and raised it up to the tailgate where we proceeded to load them into the truck. While loading them it became apparent each block was running from 30-40 pounds each. It was then stark reality set in remembering how far the fire pit was from the driveway. The dude was not willing to come home with me to help on the unloading phase so that left me hauling the blocks out of the bed, putting them on a cart behind the ATV (max 8 per load), driving out to the pit and unloading them. I wanted to see how this was going to look so went ahead and placed them down in a loose approximation of where they would go. As soon as they were all dropped into place, I repeated the entire process with a load of 40 more concrete blocks.
Hit the jump to see when things started going off-course and pictures of the finished product
Life Intrigued 