Quick updates

On this blog, I tend to focus on what's new and different in our ecofrugal life. This makes sense, but it has a downside: you hear the beginnings of a lot of stories without hearing the endings. I tell you that I've tried a new homemade conditioner, but I don't think to tell you that it turned out not to work all that well with everyday use. I tell you that we've added a strawberry bed to our garden, but I don't remember to follow up and tell you whether we got any actual strawberries out of it. 

So for this week's blog entry, instead of telling you what's new, I'm going to fill you in on the latest updates to some older stories. I'll start with the most recent stories and work my way backwards, so we're going from the smallest updates to the biggest ones.

Update #1: Potato plants

Last summer, when we got our new rain barrel, I mentioned that Brian was planning to use the old one to grow potatoes. We'd tried before to grow them in five-gallon buckets, but the results were disappointing. Brian thought that a bigger vessel, with plenty of room for the stems and tubers to form, might give us a better crop.

It's too early to say yet what our harvest will look like, but the plants themselves are flourishing in their new home. The stems have already reached the top of the barrel and are loaded with lush green foliage. They just recently flowered, as well. Brian snipped off the flowers because apparently you get more potato production that way, but I got a picture of them first. The trimmed-off blooms are now in the bud vase in our kitchen, so we've already gotten some benefit out of the plants regardless of how the potato crop turns out.

Update #2: Garden paths

Over the years we've had our garden, we've struggled to find a suitable covering for the paths between the beds. I thought I'd hit on the perfect solution with the leftover stone dust from our patio project, but within a year, weeds (and a few stray vegetable plants) were forcing their way through it. So, last winter, I decided to try a new approach: covering the paths with leaves. Using all the leaves we raked up in our own yard, as well as a bag or two of our neighbor's that we scavenged from the curb, we managed to cover all the paths a couple of inches deep.

This approach has been a moderate success. The blanket of leaves hasn't managed to suppress weeds entirely, but we're getting far fewer of them, and the ones that do pop up are easier to remove because they're rooted in loose, leafy soil rather than solid clay. (I'm only bothering to do this with the tall weeds, like crabgrass and dandelions. Ground-hugging weeds like barren strawberries, I figure, can just get walked on. If they pop up in the garden beds themselves, I'll yank them, but otherwise, they can stay where they are.) And since the leaves cost us nothing, we can simply keep replenishing them year after year.

Update #3: Strawberry bed

Last year was our first attempt at growing strawberries. Our new seed supplier offered seeds for the small Alpine variety, and we decided on a whim to add a packet to our order. The plants grew faster than we expected, and we actually managed to get a small handful of fruit off them that first year. But this year, they have really come into their own. The plants are flourishing, and we have already harvested 6 cups of tiny red and white fruits. (They're supposed to be red and yellow, but it's a very pale yellow. Alongside our honeyberries, which ripen around the same time, they make a very patriotic-looking fruit salad.) 

These little berries aren't as plump and juicy as regular strawberries. Their flavor is more concentrated, with a sort of floral undertone to it. They also don't keep nearly as well, which explains why you don't tend to see them in stores. We have to eat them up within a day or two of picking or they turn into mush. This means we can't use really use them in recipes, since we only get a cup or so of berries with each picking, and we can't save them up to get enough for a fruit crisp or a batch of jam. But eating them fresh every day (by themselves or in salads) is certainly no hardship.

So, all in all, I'd consider this experiment a success. The question now is, how long can we keep it going? According to the seed packet, these plants will only remain productive for about two years. But other sources on Alpine strawberries recommend dividing the plants "every four or five years" to keep production high and prevent overcrowding. That suggests that we should be able to expect them to last another couple of years at least. I guess we'll keep an eye on them next spring, and if it looks like they're not coming up, we can pick up a few strawberry plants of the more conventional type to replace them.

Update #4: Homemade deodorant

Over the years, I've tried various alternatives to commercial deodorant in an attempt to avoid both animal testing and excess packaging. Plain baking soda, vinegar, rubbing alcohol, and peroxide didn't work very well; milk of magnesia did but turned out to have an undesirable laxative side effect. The best of the bunch was alcohol-based hand sanitizer; it wasn't strong enough to keep me fresh as a daisy on hot summer days, but it was good enough for light activity in mild weather. 

However, this sanitizer deodorant had a few drawbacks. It still produced some plastic waste; the bottle was recyclable, but the pump top wasn't. Also, annoyingly, the pump was never able to extract all the sanitizer from the bottle, and it also made it impossible to turn the bottle upside down to get the last drops. And it became difficult to obtain during the pandemic, though I was able to get by with a homemade version made from rubbing alcohol and aloe vera gel.

So when I came across a recipe for another homemade deodorant with just three ingredients—one part baking soda, two parts cornstarch, and three parts coconut oil—I thought it was worth a try. True, straight baking soda hadn't worked that well for me, but neither had straight rubbing alcohol, yet the alcohol-based gel worked fine. In any case, it wouldn't cost much to mix up a small batch and test it out.

Well, as it turns out, this baking soda mixture works at least as well as the hand sanitizer. Like the sanitizer, it doesn't always last all day, but it's no big deal to reapply it. It also produces no plastic waste whatsoever, and it's easy to get every last drop of it out of the container. And it's cheap—less than 25 cents for that initial batch (6 tablespoons total), which has already kept me going for a few weeks and is nowhere near running out. Can't get much more ecofrugal than that!

Update #5: Patio furniture

Back in 2013, we furnished our DIY patio with a cheap patio set from IKEA. At $120 for a table and four chairs, it was a much better deal than anything available at Home Depot or Lowe's, where outdoor furniture sets started at around $500. We refinished it once in 2014, but after that we decided to just live with the weathered look.

After 11 years of use, though, the furniture was starting to have problems with more than just its appearance. The pieces had become rickety, wobbling noticeably when we sat down, and tightening the bolts didn't solve the problem. We finally concluded that we were going to need a replacement.

The obvious place to look for one was Craigslist, which we now prefer to IKEA for home furnishings. But there was a snag: unlike IKEA furniture, pieces on Craigslist come fully assembled. How would we fit a whole patio set into our little Honda Fit?

The answer: we didn't. We already knew we'd have to rent a truck at some point to haul home the lumber for our laundry room renovation (which, yes, is still in progress) and for another project that Brian wants to do outdoors (more on that one in a future post). So, once we'd booked the truck for that, we took advantage of the opportunity to haul home a $135 patio set from Craigslist as well. We were still able to get the truck back by the end of the day, so the rental fee was the same; all it cost us was a little extra for gas.

Our new patio set is superior in almost every way to our old one. The glass-topped table is larger and includes a center hole where we can add a patio umbrella, should we ever feel the need for one. The chairs, with their woven plastic seats, are quite comfortable even with no added cushions. And both table and chairs are made of materials that should stand up better to the elements than our old wooden pieces. The previous owner had already kept them outdoors for several summers, and the table during the winters as well, and they're all still in good shape. So, given the same treatment, this new set should serve us for many years to come.

Patio furniture follow-up

It's now been about a year since we officially completed our patio project by furnishing our new outdoor space with this Askholmen dining set from IKEA. At the time, this 5-piece, $120 set, made of solid acacia wood, looked like an outstanding deal, considering that similar outdoor dining sets sold elsewhere were going for $650 or more. Sure, it was just a basic wooden picnic table and chairs, but it felt reasonably comfortable, it seemed fairly durable, and, when first put together, it looked quite nice on our new patio. In our excitement, we didn't pay too much attention to the description of our new patio set, which said it was finished with "acrylic glazing paint" rather than stain and that we could "easily protect [it] against wear and tear by reglazing it on a regular basis, for example once a year."

Turns out, we should have taken that as a warning. After a year of wear and tear, the warm brown finish on our chairs and table had not only faded to a greyish hue but was also flaking off in big, uneven patches. If the fading were the only problem, we might have just decided to stick with the "weathered" look, but the flaking was definitely unsightly. And re-glazing with another coat of the same stuff didn't seem like the greatest idea, since both our past experience and the description from IKEA suggested that we'd just end up having to do it again every year.

So we cruised the aisles at Lowe's looking for something more durable, and we came across a can labeled "Olympic Maximum Stain + Sealant in One." It said it was for "decks, fences & siding," so we figured it ought to be durable enough for our outdoor furniture. It promised to protect against "water damage and graying for a minimum of 4 years," and a quart can, which looked ample for our small refinishingproject, was only $15. The only catch was that it was an oil-based product. I normally have a strong preference for water-based finishes, which dry faster, clean up with plain soap and water, and don't produce fumes that can knock you out. However, for this particular job, the durability of an oil-based product seemed to outweigh these advantages. We'd be applying the stuff out in the open air anyway, so the fumes wouldn't be too bothersome, and applying "one thin coat" to finish everything would definitely be a lot less work than taking multiple passes to apply stain plus at least three coats of water-based sealant, sanding after each round. And it wouldn't matter that much if it took 24 hours to dry, since we wouldn't have to apply a second coat afterwards.

Actually, as it turned out, the fumes from this product weren't that bad at all. Not only did we not feel any lightheadedness or headache after working with it for a few hours, we couldn't even smell it unless we leaned right down next to the can. We speculated that the people who make these things must have come up with something less toxic to use than old-fashioned polyurethane; the label says it's mainly a "modified acrylic resin," with a few other unpronounceable chemicals thrown in. (Of course, the original finish on this stuff was acrylic too, which isn't too encouraging—but that 4-year guarantee offers some reassurance.)

Although the stain was easy enough to work with, the project was still a pretty big hassle. The problem is that, as you can see from the pictures, these pieces are made of lots of individual slats. Each of these slats has multiple exposed surfaces, and each one of these surfaces had to be gone over twice: first with sandpaper to remove the old, flaking stain, and then with the new stain. Brian did the larger, flattish surfaces with an orbital sander he'd picked up at a yard sale, while I used a square of sandpaper to work on the little fiddly bits in between slats and on the ends where the sander couldn't reach. The disk on the sander gave out, along with our supply of medium-grade sandpaper, by the time we'd finished the table, so we ended up having to make a Home Depot run to pick up more, and we then burned through about one sanding disk and one quarter-sheet of sandpaper on each of the four chairs. We also produced a huge quantity of sawdust, but fortunately Brian had had the foresight to put down a tarp under the patio set before we started, so he just carefully gathered it up and dumped the contents directly into the trash. We didn't risk putting them in the compost bin for fear that the residue of the original "acrylic glazing paint" wouldn't agree with our plants.

After that, we had to go over those same multiple surfaces with the stain. This was a bit trickier, because each piece had both a top and a bottom, so we had to do all the surfaces on the underside first, leaving just enough exposed wood to grab it by and flip it before we could do the top surfaces. We found the easiest way to work with the stain was to get a goodish amount on the brush, then apply the bulk of it to a single horizontal slat, and then use the little traces that remained on the brush to squeeze into the little fiddly areas between slats. Doing it the other way around mean that too much of the stain came off at once and pooled in the crevices, leading to drips. The whole process took us most of the afternoon, but eventually we had five nicely refinished pieces sitting out to dry in the fading sunlight, while we dumped our cheap foam brushes straight into the trash (rather than mess around with mineral spirits trying to clean them) and ourselves into the shower.

The final result is far from perfect. Although we went over every bit of the chairs with both sandpaper and stain, we couldn't manage to get all the old finish off in some of those little hard-to-reach spots, so the wood tone is a bit more uneven than it was before. There are also a few spots, particularly on the undersides, which didn't get sanded very thoroughly, so the surface is a bit rough. Still, it's unlikely anyone's ever going to bother looking at the undersides, and any flaws in the finish are only noticeable if you know where to look for them. The main thing is that the chairs look overwhelmingly better now than they did just a couple of days ago.

Overall, I'd still recommend that this IKEA patio set as a good deal. After all, $120 is a lot less than you'll pay anywhere else, and even if the finish didn't hold up that well, the wood itself is still in good shape (although we found that after a year of use, many of the hex nuts needed to be re-tightened). However, I'd now offer a caveat to anyone planning to buy the Askhomlen dining set: either keep it sheltered from the weather when you're not using it, or else go over all the pieces with a durable outdoor finish before you put it together. This whole project would have been a lot easier if we'd had a bunch of flat pieces to work with, instead of fully assembled chairs with lots of nooks and crannies.

Two piles down

What you see in this picture is something you couldn't see in this part of our yard for most of the past three years: the ground.

Ever since that fateful day in March 2010 when I answered a posting on Freecycle offering a load of cement pavers, this part of our yard has been home to a stack of bricks about three feet high, six wide, and two deep. After a while we got so used to it that we more or less stopped noticing it was there; it just sort of blended into the landscape. And even after most of the pavers finally made their way into our new patio a month ago, the pile didn't entirely disappear; in fact, it actually spread out more, as the bricks we'd rejected due to defects of various kinds formed a secondary pile, much untidier than the first, next to what remained of the original stack.

But no longer. As of today, the pavers that we've decided are still usable (for some potential future project as yet to be determined) are neatly stacked against the back wall of our shed, forming a pile four bricks deep, five wide, and nine high. The ones that we've deemed too badly damaged to use are in a smaller stack next to our trash barrel, where they can be added by ones and twos to each load of garbage as we put it out for pickup. And the ground where the brick pile once stood is ground once again—a bit bare, perhaps, since nothing green could have survived three years without seeing the sunlight, but at the rate the weeds in our yard spread, the bare patch will be covered over in no time.

So that's two of the four piles left over from our patio project gone, and two still left to deal with: the big pile of dirt excavated from under the patio, much of which will no doubt go into smoothing out the new slope we built up around its edges, and the pile of concrete chunks left over from the demolition of the old concrete slab, which will...well, we'll think of something. But bit by bit, our yard is finally starting to look like a yard again, rather than a recently abandoned construction site. I actually have hopes that before fall comes, we may get it to the point where the whole yard finally looks better with the new patio than it looked without it.

The Patio Project, Stage 8: Furnishing

The night we finished (or nearly finished) work on our new patio, Brian hauled a card table and a couple of folding chairs out there so that we could use our new space right away. However, it was clear that this makeshift furniture wasn't really going to work for us over the long term; to enjoy our patio properly, we'd need some real outdoor furniture. And as I observed last year, this stuff doesn't tend to come cheap. A quick Google search just now on "patio furniture" popped up a sponsored list of hits ranging from $500 to $2500 in price, and even the sets we saw on sale on our last trip to Home Depot were marked down to between $300 and $600.

Fortunately, there's always IKEA.

Within a day of completing the patio, we had already checked out the patio sets on IKEA's website and narrowed our choices down to two favorites. The 4-piece Äpplarö set, priced at $220, was solid acacia wood with a nice dark-brown finish, and all the individual pieces could be folded up for storage. The Askholmen set was also solid acacia, had a lighter finish, and was even cheaper—only $120 for four pieces—but it wouldn't fold up. We were leaning toward the Äpplarö, thinking that folding pieces might be worth an extra $100 because we could store them inside during the winter, but we figured it would be best to see them at the store and try them out in person before making our decision.

This turned out to be a good idea, as we found to our surprise that the cheaper Askholmen set (a name that Brian promptly changed to "afikomen") actually felt sturdier and more comfortable to sit on. The table was also wider and shorter than the Äpplarö table, making it a slightly more convenient size for dining. And the Askholmen furniture, though it didn't fold up, was still lightweight enough that we figured it wouldn't be too much trouble to carry it inside if a hurricane was forecast or something. In fact, there was only one problem with it: it was out of stock at our local store. So looking at it one way, we'd just made a decision that would save us $100 on our patio furniture; but looking at it another way, we'd just spent 10 bucks on gas and tolls for a wasted trip, since we'd have to come back a second time to get the furniture once it was in stock again. (Actually, we spent a bit more than that, since we ended up buying a few odds and ends while we were there—a drying rack, a pair of scissors, a couple of jars of lingonberries, and some coffee and chocolate bars—but we figured we would have bought those things anyway, even if we'd made only one trip.)

Fortunately, the furniture was back in stock within a few days, and since we took the 25th off for our anniversary, we took the opportunity to go back and get it. (The trip was just as expensive on a weekday, but the traffic conditions, both on the Turnpike and in the store itself, were much better.) It was a few days before we could get around to assembling the pieces, but once we did, they went together very easily with just a screwdriver and an Allen wrench, which was thoughtfully included in the box (we've now assembled a fairly large collection of these, since for some reason we can never bring ourselves to throw one out). We were also grateful that IKEA provided instructions in an easy-to-follow pictorial form, rather than a set of inscrutable directions translated from Swedish.

So here, at last, you can see our new patio in its more-or-less final state. Along with the furniture, there's been one other addition that you can see at left in the picture: a new rack to hold our garden hose. This used to hang from a hook suspended on a metal post stuck into the ground, but the post had to come out when we started to dig the patio, so we picked up a simple $10 hose hanger at Home Depot to take its place. It only came in green, which I thought might look odd against our blue house, so Brian gave it a quick coat of black spray paint before attaching it to the foundation with a couple of masonry screws. And there you have it, folks: a finished, furnished patio. Just for the sake of completeness, I'll throw in a cost breakdown for the project like they do at "Young House Love":

Demolition: $0 (thanks to the generous loan of a jackhammer from our awesome neighbor)
Wheelbarrow: $37.43 (this will probably be used for other projects as well, but we bought it for this, so we'll count it for this)
Gravel, stone dust, ground cloth, and staples: $278.68 (including delivery)
Pavers: $0 (thanks to a great find on Freecycle, which was what started this whole project off in the first place)
Tamper tool: $32.08
Two-by-four for screeding: $3
Sand: $7.85
Furniture: $123.16 (with tax, which is only half the usual rate because the Elizabeth IKEA store is in one of New Jersey's special "development zones")
Hose hanger: $10.69 (no charge for the spray paint, since we had some left over)
TOTAL: $492.89

Spending a whole week together, covered in dirt and sweat, building this thing with our own hands: priceless.

Two birds with one stone...dust

Yesterday, about three weeks after we theoretically completed our patio project, we finally got around to clearing the big pile of leftover stone dust out of our driveway. And guess where we put it?

Yes, that's right...more than a year after I first started considering the idea, we finally have something other than weeds to cover our garden paths. First we yanked out all the weeds we could get our hands on; then we put down a layer of weed barrier, starting with what we had left over from the patio project and then, when that ran out, going off to Home Depot for another roll. Then we shoveled the stone dust from the pile into the wheelbarrow and started trundling it into the back yard. The first wheelbarrow-load was able to get dumped directly into the garden through the gate, but after that we had to carry it in by hand. Brian used one of our big garden spades to transport it, while I hauled out the smallest of our reclaimed cocoa butter buckets and used that. It was a slow process, but bit by bit, over the course of the afternoon, we managed to transfer the entire contents of the pile from our driveway to the paths. (Well, almost the entire contents—we were racing against an approaching thunderstorm toward the end, so the final load ended up remaining in the wheelbarrow and just being shoved into the shed to be dealt with later. But Brian transferred that last bit to the paths this afternoon when he came up against the laden wheelbarrow in the shed, nearly knocked it over, and decided it had better be emptied before it emptied itself.)

So, after about 15 months of considering and debating, we finally have permanent paths in our garden. And quite by accident, we seem to have come across the perfect surface for them. It won't decompose and require replacing, like mulch; it won't roll around underfoot and escape from the fenced area, like pea gravel; and it packs down to form a firm, almost rocklike surface that even our tough garden weeds should have a hard time poking their heads through, especially with that additional layer of weed barrier underneath. And because the stone dust was left over from the patio project, all we actually spent on the paths themselves was $29 for a roll of weed cloth (and we still have a fair bit of that left over for future applications).

Oh yes, and after three weeks of delays, we finally have the full width of our driveway available to park in, as well.

The Patio Project, Stage 7: Filling

As I mentioned in my previous entry, when we finished laying the patio pavers on Sunday, Brian attempted to fill in the cracks between them with stone dust, since we had plenty of it left over. However, it turned out to be much too coarse for the purpose. Most of it just ended up sitting on the surface, and neither the broom nor the hose could force it into the cracks. So we came to the conclusion that we'd need something finer, and on Monday, we stopped by the Aldi and picked up a couple of bags of playground sand. (They also had something called "masonry sand," which we might have been inclined to think was most suitable for our purposes, but upon close examination, the playground sand turned out to be finer and also slightly cheaper.)

As soon as we got home, Brian dusted the patio with it and found that it worked much better than the stone dust. However, he also found that a single once-over with the broom wasn't going to be enough to fill in all the cracks. He'd pour sand over an area, sweep it carefully into all the crevices, run over it with the hose, and find that the wet sand had sunk into the cracks without a trace, leaving them just as visible as before. So it looks like getting them filled in is going to be a gradual process—adding one layer of sand at a time, sweeping it in, and hosing it down until the cracks won't absorb any more.

He did, however, make a little more progress toward filling in the much bigger gaps that we'd left around the edges of the patio. Since we still had plenty of fill dirt piled up from the excavation phase, he just scooped up a couple of shovelfuls, dumped it into the cracks, and packed it down. It doesn't exactly look seamless, but
at least it keeps the edges of the patio from wobbling. Eventually we'll get the whole area re-seeded, but the lady at Home Depot advised us to wait until fall if possible, because grass doesn't like to grow in hot weather. So in the meantime, we'll just have a patch of lawn that's a bit straggly and brown, rather than filled with lush, green weeds as high as our knees. Works for me.

So, that about wraps it up for the Patio Project. We've still got all those piles to dispose of, of course, and I'll fill you in on how that goes in future entries, but that's really a separate project—tidying up the yard, rather than constructing the patio. Now all we need is some furniture to put on it, which I'm sure is another topic that will pop up in future posts. (Based on my observations back in 2012, I suspect that IKEA will be the way to go.)

The Patio Project, Stage 6: Pavers

As of Friday evening, the good news was that we had the gravel and the stone dust in place and we were finally ready to start putting down pavers. The bad news was that the forecast for the weekend called for temperatures in the 90s, high humidity, and "abundant sunshine". And the back of our house, where we'd be working, would be in full sun until around 2pm. So, rather than risk heatstroke, we decided to shift our work schedule. We spent the morning puttering around the house, taking care of various jobs we'd been too busy to deal with all week long. Only around 1:30, when the shadow of the house had crept out to a distance of about 3 feet from the wall, did we venture out and start actually handling the pavers.

When we first started out, I actually thought it was conceivable that we might be able to lay the entire patio in one day. After all, when we'd first acquired these pavers from Freecycle three years back, we'd actually moved every single paver in the pile three times in one day: once from the original owner's yard to the back of his pickup, which he kindly offered to use to help us with the hauling; once from the back of the pickup to our driveway; and once from the driveway down to the back yard, where they've been piled ever since. (We might have chosen let them sit in the driveway overnight and move them the next day, but a passing neighbor spotted the pile and said, "Hey, are you going to use those pavers?" and we figured we'd better relocate the pile quickly to save it from possible scavengers.)

However, as with every other stage of this project, there turned out to be complications. Moving the pavers was simple enough, but laying them down wasn't. Although the pattern we'd chosen was a simple basket weave, which required no cutting or complicated fitting, it turned out that our secondhand pavers weren't quite uniform in size and shape. So we couldn't just plunk down two vertical ones and then two horizontal ones; we had to carefully select and position pavers so they'd fit into a given space. We also ended up rejecting several of the pavers in our pile—perhaps as many as one in twenty—because they were too badly damaged. Fortunately, we'd chosen a patio size that we knew we'd have more than enough pavers to cover.

Since laying the pavers was such a fiddly job, Brian ended up devoting himself to that part of the work full-time. He sat on the slowly growing patio, testing different pavers for size, aligning them with another piece of two-by-four, and when necessary, pounding them into place with a mallet, while I went back and forth to the pile fetching more pavers for him to work with. Ironically, this meant that I was the one doing the heavy work—especially toward the beginning of the afternoon, when the patio area itself was in shade but the paver pile wasn't. But as the day wore on, the shade extended all the way across the yard, and by evening we were both working in relative comfort, aside from occasional mosquito attacks. So we took advantage of the cooler temperature by working right through our normal dinner hour, finally calling a halt to the work around 8pm.

Unlike Stages 4 and 5, which started on the far side of the patio and worked their way back, this part of the job began in the corner by the patio door. Back in Stage 3 (Excavation), Brian took the opportunity to pry out the cracked concrete that was supporting the threshold of the patio door, as you can see in this picture. So during Stages 4 and 5, the only support under the door was a thin, weathered strip of wood with a note on it saying "Watch the Step" to remind us not to put our weight on it. Thus, getting the pavers into place under that door was our first priority. Also, since the bricks used in this corner would have to slip under the wooden threshold, it made sense to place them first, while we still had room to maneuver, and then work our way forward.

Once we had a row of bricks in place under the threshold, Brian worked his way down the shorter edge of the patio that aligned with the edge of the door. We'd dug the pit a little bit on the big side to leave room for an edging if we chose to add one, so Brian stuck that perennially useful two-by-four along the edge of the newly forming patio to align the bricks. After that, he started worked his way along a diagonal path, extending gradually outward from the original rows.By the end of our first day on the job, we had more than half the pavers in place.

Unfortunately, any hopes that this would allow us to finish the job quickly on Sunday were quickly scotched. The task of fitting the pavers into place got more and more complicated as it went on, since the small dissimilarities in size between them magnified with each row, to the point where they required Brian to search for bricks of a specific size to fit into a given spot and make up the difference. Also, several of the bricks split when tested and had to be rejected. Moreover, Sunday was even hotter than Saturday, and although we once again waited to start work until the back of the patio itself was in shade, the paver pile was still in full, blazing sun. I had to stop for frequent breaks, and toward the end of the day I found myself constantly checking and re-checking the number of bricks I had left to haul. At last, around 6pm, the number ticked down to zero, and I was able to go inside, dump my clothes in the washer, and head upstairs for a shower, leaving Brian to finish laying the last few bricks.

So, we did manage—just—to get the bulk of this patio finished in the week that I allotted for the job. Of course, that doesn't mean that our work here is done; we still have to spread more sand to fill in the gaps between the bricks, and add more dirt to fill in the gaps around the edges and smooth out the surface of the hill that we created with our sod bricks. And since that won't come close to using up all the dirt that we excavated in Stage 3, we also have to figure out a way to dispose of the rest of our huge pile of dirt...

...and our big pile of concrete chunks...

...and the leftover bricks that didn't get used in the patio...

...and the leftover gravel and stone dust. 

But we do at least have, at this point, the basic outline of a patio. Brian actually went so far as to set up the grill Sunday night on the nearly-finished patio and haul a card table and two folding chairs out there so that we could dine on the terrace. The terrace in question may have been covered in stone dust (which he had attempted to sweep into the cracks before determining that a finer grade of sand would be needed) and swarming with mosquitoes, but we'd spent all week building that patio, and by gum, we were going to use it.

The Patio Project, Stage 5: Sand

In tonight's performance, the role of "sand" will be played by stone dust.

Actually, this turned out to be the most straightforward part of the whole project. Yes, we still had to use the wheelbarrow and the ramp to haul stone dust down to the patio, but the dust was a lot easier to shovel than the gravel. We did inevitably find ourselves picking up a few bigger bits of stone in each shovelful, but we just picked them out by hand and dropped them into a bucket. No doubt we'll find a use for this leftover stone eventually—perhaps as a weed barrier in some part of the garden.

Brian decided to put down the layer of stone dust using a slightly different method from the previous stage of the project. With the gravel, we filled up the entire cavity first and then worked on leveling the piles. With the stone dust, however, we dumped just a couple of loads at a time and then screeded them, using short lengths of two-by-four and molding to create a reasonably level surface. This way, we didn't need to stand or sit on one dust-covered area in order to smooth out the area next to it. We were also able to keep an eye on the thickness of the sand layer as we worked and make sure that it was at roughly the recommended 1-inch depth. (If we'd filled in the whole thing at once, we wouldn't have been able to see where the top of the sand was in relation to the gravel underneath.) So we started at the far end and worked our way back to the near end where the ramp was, until at last we could remove the ramp and dump the last loads straight into the pit.

This whole process went much faster than I expected. The only complication we encountered was that as we swept our screed boards over the dust, they'd occasionally knock loose a buried piece of gravel, which would leave a furrow in the dust layer below. So we'd just pick these out by hand, toss them in another bucket, and fill in the gaps with more stone dust. We were actually able to fill in the entire area with stone dust by the end of the day on Friday, and on Saturday we just made a few adjustments: checking the level, removing the corner stakes, adding more dust where needed, and tamping it down. In fact, this whole stage was done so quickly that I never managed to get a picture of it while it was in progress, but I did get a shot of the the end result: a (reasonably) smooth layer of stone dust, neatly tamped and ready to accept the first pavers. It's almost a patio!

The Patio Project, Stage 4: Gravel

Having completed the excavation of the patio foundation on Wednesday morning, our next job was to fill it up with gravel to a depth of 4 inches. This phase of the Great Patio Project spread across three days, as we knocked off work early on Thursday to go celebrate the Glorious Fourth with friends. Loading in gravel might seem like a more straightforward job than the digging, which ended up turning into a sort of terraforming project, but once again, there were complications. Three complications in particular slowed down the work.

Complication #1: The slope of our yard isn't confined to the back yard. In fact, it slopes even more steeply from front to back, so that our back door is down one level from our front door. The only way to get from front yard to back is through the side yard, down a short, steep flight of concrete steps. This, of course, made it impossible for our truckload of gravel and stone dust to be dumped anywhere near the site of the future patio. It had to be dumped out in our driveway, and we had to cart it down by hand. We bought a small wheelbarrow (about 4 cubic feet in capacity) for about $35 at Home Depot, but that was only a partial solution, because a wheelbarrow obviously isn't designed to go down stairs. So Brian built a ramp out of scrap wood. However, his first test run with it revealed that it didn't offer enough traction for him to push a wheelbarrow down it and maintain control of it. So he modified the ramp by first pushing it to one side, so that he could keep one foot on the steps, and then applying some strips of traction tape that we bought for our basement stairs and ended up not using. This worked okay until dust started to build up on the ramp, making it slippery again. So it became my job, after Brian pushed the wheelbarrow down the ramp, to wipe it down with a damp rag and keep it as dust-free as possible. The traction strips started to peel off around the edges by the end of the second day of work, but it held up long enough for us to get all the gravel into the pit.

Complication #2: Remember how we saved the cost of an extra delivery fee by having the gravel and stone dust delivered in a single load? Well, the down side of this was that the gravel and stone dust ended up in a single pile, with the dust more or less on top—and the gravel was what we needed to use first. We could get at the gravel from one side of the pile, so we started there, but even there the gravel and stone dust had mixed to the point that we were invariably getting some of each in every scoop. To add to the muddle, we received our shipment of gravel on Monday morning in pouring rain, so the pile was thoroughly sodden. This meant that instead of just shoveling gravel, we were shoveling lumps of gravel in a matrix of wet stone dust. The term "stone dust," incidentally, is a bit misleading; its texture resembles nothing so much as clay cat litter. So the wheelbarrow, our shovels, and our work gloves all gradually built up a thick layer of cement-like grey mud, which made them heavier and heavier as we worked, so we had to stop periodically to rinse them. Also, the excess water made the material denser and harder to lift, so each shovelful contained a smaller volume than it would have if the gravel had been dry. All this slowed down the shoveling process, and it slowed still more on the second day, when we hit the point where what we could reach on top of the pile was mostly stone dust. After that point, we had to interrupt our shoveling to attempt to scoop the stone dust off the top of the big pile into separate, smaller piles to get at the gravel underneath. We pushed it around with the shovels and even sifted it through our fingers to remove the big lumps. We suspect there's still at least a bit of gravel buried under the stone dust we have left, but we got to a point where we had to just declare that we'd dug out all the gravel we reasonably could dig.

Complication #3: All those blocks of sod that we piled up around the edges of the patio pit in Stage 3 made a rather bumpy slope over which it was difficult to push the wheelbarrow. Brian fixed this initially by taking a piece of plywood that he'd been using as a worktable (propped up on a pair of sawhorses in the shop) and using it as a ramp to get the wheelbarrow over the turf pile and then dump it off the edge into the pit. However, there were two problems with this system. First, in order to get to the ramp, he had to push the wheelbarrow all the way around to the far edge of the pit, which was the one path that wouldn't take him over any of the turf piles. And second, he could only dump the gravel around the edges of the pit, and we needed to fill the whole area. So eventually he chose a spot on the near edge of the pit where he could manage to push the wheelbarrow up the rough slope, or steps, formed by the sod blocks, and repositioned the ramp so that it led down into the pit from there. He could then dump wheelbarrow-loads of gravel all throughout the pit, working his way in and back from the far edge.

By time we knocked off work on the second day, we had the pit completely filled with piles of gravel. Our challenge then was to turn these hills and valleys into a plain running roughly three inches below the line that we'd marked as ground level for the finished patio. We started out by walking on the piles to squish them down, and then we went to work with shovels and rakes and implements of destruction, pushing gravel from the mounds into the troughs. Then Brian got out a two-by-four he'd bought for the purpose and laid it across the surface with his level on top. This allowed him to check whether the overall surface of the gravel bed was sloping in the right direction, and also to identify any peaks and valleys that were still visible under the line of the two-by-four. So we repeatedly measured and tweaked, pushing a few lumps of gravel this way and that, until we had a roughly even surface. Then, for the final stage, we got out our tamper tool, purchased specifically for this project at Lowe's. Basically, it's just a flat, heavy metal plate attached to a long wooden handle, which you use to pound down the gravel bed so that it's as flat and firmly packed as possible.

The tamper is the one tool that we bought specifically and exclusively for the patio project; the wheelbarrow, though essential for this project, will also be a handy thing to have in the future. The tamper, by contrast, can only do one job, and it's a job we only expect to do once. But for this one job, you really can't do without it, so it was 30 bucks well spent. And as you can see above, by the middle of the day on Friday, we had a nice, level bed of gravel, on which we could begin piling our stone dust to make a cushion for the pavers. And since the stone dust is a lot easier to shovel than the gravel, we're likely to get through Stage 5 a lot faster than Stage 4.

The Patio Project, Stage 3: Excavation

Technically, I guess Measurement should be listed as a separate stage before Excavation, but as it turned out, the measurements we took affected the digging process and, in fact, ended up turning it into a combination of digging out and building up. So I'm lumping all three stages together.

You see, our handy patio guide explains that to create a foundation for your patio, you need to excavate the entire area to a depth of 7 inches. Sounds simple enough. However, there are a couple of additional parameters: first, you want the patio to slope slightly away from the house, at a rate of about one quarter-inch of drop per foot of length, so that water will run off. And second, for the same reason, you want the surface of the patio to be slightly above, or at least no lower than, ground level. Now, if you're starting with a nice level surface, this is simple enough: you just dig slightly deeper on the far side than on the near side. But if you're attempting to build a patio that's only slightly sloped in a yard that already slopes significantly in two different directions, you can run into complications.

This picture can give you a rough idea of the problem. The four corners of the patio should be right next to the door, right below the window, and about ten feet out from each of those points. The problem is that the ground slopes down from the window to the door, and slopes even more steeply heading outward from the house. For drainage reasons, the patio couldn't be below ground level at the window, and for more obvious reasons, it couldn't be above ground level at the door. And while having the patio slope away from the house was fine, the appropriate amount of slope for its size would be about 2.5 inches—but the actual difference in ground level was more like 7 inches on the window side and more than 10 inches on the door side.

So how did we fix the problem? Well, you notice how, in the picture, the turf in the foreground looks kind of like stacked blocks, rather than a smooth slope? That's because it is.

Actually, we'd already been wondering about how we would deal with a second problem in the excavation phase of this project: where to put all the dirt we'd be digging up. And since the top layer of dirt that we removed was in the form of nice, neat rectangles of turf, Brian came up with the idea of stacking these blocks around the edges of the patio to make a wall, so that the four corners of the patio would be closer to level. In other words, instead of digging down to an even depth of 7 inches, we'd be building up the edges in the areas where the ground level was too low. We made the wall highest right at the edge of the patio, then gradually dropped off its height as it extended outward into the yard, as you can see here. So Stage 3 of the Patio Project ended up being not just excavation, but also terraforming.

This idea kind of killed three birds with one stone. It solved our slope problem, it gave us a use for the excess squares of sod, and best of all, it reduced the amount of dirt that we actually had to remove to get down to the recommended 7-inch depth. Which turned out to be a very good thing, because while removing and stacking the blocks of turf was hard work, it was a picnic compared to digging out the clay subsoil underneath. The how-to-make-a-patio guides all just gloss over this part of the process, blithely saying, "Dig the patio 7" deep," as if this were a straightforward procedure. And maybe it is for people with normal soil, but our soil is so dense that you can't just scoop it up with a shovel; you have to more or less chisel it out, chopping at the solid mass with a spade and then ramming the shovel into the pile once it's been loosened. Once again, our heavy-duty King of Spades proved indispensable for breaking up the hard-packed dirt. We also had to pause repeatedly to dig out rocks that blocked the path of the shovel—ranging from no bigger than a golf ball, so that you had to wonder how something that small could stop a metal blade dead in its tracks, to one that that was literally as big as my head. It took both of us to heft the thing over the edge of the newly dug hole.

So, with the combination of rain delays on Monday, the added work of stacking sod bricks, and the heavy-duty soil we had to bore through, it took us until around noon today just to finish this stage of the project. But we finally did get the entire hole dug out and lined with garden fabric, held down with metal staples that look like miniature croquet wickets. (Our soil is so dense that even pounding the staples in was a challenge; Brian kept hitting places where they simply refused to be driven into the ground, even by a blow from an eight-pound hammer. He finally ended up moving them around until he hit a spot soft enough to push them in.) The bit of rubble that was left over from the concrete pad we broke up last week got shoved out to the edges—particularly the far right corner, which ended up being lower than the rest of the hole even though we'd removed nothing except the outer turf. We figured the bits of concrete would add a little bulk to help build up the foundation in that area.

And there you have it: a big hole in the ground, ready to be filled with gravel and stone dust from the massive pile sitting out in our driveway. Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of The Patio Project, when you'll hear Amy say, "You load four and a half tons and what do you get...."

The Patio Project, Phase Two: Materials

Although the biggest component in a paver patio—the pavers themselves—has already been supplied by Freecycle, there's still quite a lot of material that needs to go into the ground before the pavers can be installed. According to our handy guide, those pavers will need to go on top of four inches of gravel topped with one inch of sand, and to keep pesky weeds out, there should be a layer of landscape fabric under all that. Now, landscape fabric we could just pick up at the Home Depot, and they do sell gravel and sand there as well—but only in 50-pound bags, and we'd need around 34 of them for the sand alone. At $2.50 apiece. So it quickly became apparent that buying by the bag wasn't really going to be either practical or economical.

So last week, I started searching for a place in our area that sells gravel and sand in bulk. And I quickly ran up against my first snag: I had no idea what kind of business to look for. There was no listing in the Yellow Pages under "gravel," and when I looked under "stone" I kept finding places that sold stone countertops. So finally I just put our address into Google, told it to "search nearby," and typed in "gravel." That gave me several names to get started with. Most of the listings included websites, too, but when I tried to visit them, I ran into my second snag. Two of the listed websites didn't work at all; others had little or no information about what products the business actually carried. Fortunately, I did find one, the Belle Mead Co-Op, that not only had a complete product list but included price information as well. So with the help of that site, I was able to come up with a baseline estimate of about $210—including delivery—for all the stuff we wanted to buy. That was the price that the other businesses on my list would have to try to beat.

Getting estimates from these other businesses wasn't as easy as I'd hoped, either. At the first one I tried, I got a machine and left a message, and no one ever called me back. At the second one, a guy told me how much they charged per ton for sand and gravel, but he shied away from giving me an actual estimate, saying he wanted to wait for the guy who was in charge of that department to come back because he didn't want to give me information that might be wrong. Since that business also had an e-mail address, I tried sending a message to request a quote, but once again, no reply. And the third one I called said they didn't sell sand.

Well, at this point, the Belle Mead Co-Op was starting to look pretty good to me. I sent them an e-mail to make sure they could deliver to our area, and they responded—promptly, no less—to say it would be no problem. But before taking the plunge and ordering from them, I took a quick look at the FAQ on their site and discovered snag number three: the site said it was "not recommended" to "combine bulk products in the same dump delivery," such as gravel and sand, because they would mix together when dumped. That meant that we'd have to get two separate shipments, each with the $85 delivery charge. So my original estimate was now bumped up to around $300.

Slightly sticker-shocked by this revelation, I decided to make a more concerted effort to get quotes from more nearby places in the hopes that they could deliver for less. At the first place, I got the machine again, and I didn't bother leaving a second message, since I doubted it would get a response of the first one hadn't. At the second, I managed to reach the guy in charge of the gravel department, who ran some calculations and told me that he thought we would actually need more than a ton of sand for the top layer, even though every calculator I'd tried elsewhere said it should be a bit less. So he gave me an estimate that included 1.5 tons of sand and two delivery charges (of $80 each, despite the fact that this place was only half as far away from us as the Co-Op). Total cost: about $283.

Well, that was less than what I expected to pay at the Co-Op, but honestly, I wasn't that thrilled at the prospect of dealing with these guys. Based on my interactions with them, they just didn't strike me as all that reliable. I also dug up one more local business off the list and, after being cut off the first time I called, managed to get an estimate from them. They were actually the closest of all to us, yet they were charging a $100 delivery fee per truck, which bumped their total cost up to $313. The fact that this was higher than the Co-Op's estimate was what finally made my mind up that the Co-Op's price was reasonable, and it was worth an extra $15 or so to go with the business that seemed most trustworthy. They'd been up-front about their prices, listing everything right on the web; they'd answered all my questions promptly; they just seemed like a better place to do business with.

Turns out my instincts were right on. When I called them up to place the order, the guy on the phone jotted down all my information and then offered a suggestion: why not get "stone dust" instead of sand? Stone dust, apparently, is a mixture of coarse and fine stone tailings, and contractors usually prefer it to sand because it's cheaper and easier to work with. The idea was that we could sort the stuff by the shovelful and add the coarser bits to the gravel base, then use the fine dust for the top layer. To make up for the fact that the stone dust contains both coarse and fine bits, we could increase the volume of stone dust slightly, and decrease the volume of gravel. And if we used stone dust, we wouldn't need two separate deliveries, since it wouldn't matter if it mixed with the gravel; we'd just sort it as we shoveled anyway. I was so thrilled to have just saved $85 that when he offered to sell us the landscape fabric as well, I said yes without even bothering to see if it was cheaper at Home Depot; I was happy to throw a little extra business their way and have one less thing to pick up ourselves.

So, in total, I ended up buying 3 tons of road stone, 1.5 tons of stone dust, 1 hundred-foot roll of landscape fabric, and a pack of staples for holding it down, for $278.68, including delivery—less than I'd have paid at any of the local places even without the landscape fabric thrown in. And when I hung up the phone, I felt more justified than ever in my view that, when dealing with any kind of service—even if the service is just having something delivered—you'll get the best value by dealing with a business you trust. And often, as it turns out, you'll actually pay the lowest price that way, as well.

The Patio Project, Phase One: Demolition

It has been more than three years now since we hauled home nearly a thousand concrete pavers that we found on Freecycle with the intention of building a patio. We stacked all the pavers in a corner of our yard by the shed, and there they've sat, untouched, ever since. Some of them literally have moss growing on them. So this year, I made up my mind that we were going to quit procrastinating, set aside a block of time, and actually get this thing done. P-Day—or to be more exact, P-Week—is scheduled for July 1 through July 5, and we are both taking the whole week off from work to make sure we have enough time to finish the job, whether the weather cooperates or not.

To prepare for this project, I did a little research and found this handy step-by-step guide to building a paver patio from Lowe's. According to this guide, the first step in the process, once you've bought all your materials and marked out the area, is to dig out the foundation. It recommends digging the entire area 7 inches deep to allow for 4 inches of gravel, 1 inch of sand, and the thickness of the pavers themselves. However, before we can start this process, we need to add one additional step: removing the concrete pad that's filling up one corner of our future patio site.

So, once again, I consulted the Great Oracle (otherwise known as the Internet) and dug up an article from the Family Handyman about how to demolish concrete. This article recommended taking a whack at it (or several whacks) with a sledgehammer before deciding whether or not to rent a jackhammer for the job. So we borrowed a sledgehammer from a friend, and last Sunday, Brian headed out there to pound on the concrete with it. And pound. And pound. And after several sessions of pounding (interspersed with long breaks for rest and hydration), succeed in chipping away only a small corner of the concrete pad.

Fortunately, this was the point at which our next-door neighbor, watching this process over the fence, took pity on him and asked, "Would you like to borrow a jackhammer?"

Yes. Yes he would.

Much as we both prefer to use our own muscle power when we can, there's no denying that sometimes there's nothing like a power tool to get the job done. While several hours of repeated attempts with the sledge had produced little more than a few cracks, just an hour or two with the jackhammer was enough to reduce the solid slab of concrete to a heap of rubble. Several large chunks still remained that needed to be worked loose with a pry bar, but it was actually possible to see dirt at the bottom of the hole. (And our awesome neighbor refused to accept any sort of payment for the loan of the jackhammer, even when we offered homemade pie.)

Unfortunately, we still haven't really worked out how to handle the second phase of the demolition, which is getting rid of the old concrete. The smaller chunks can be mixed in with the gravel base of the new patio, but the big ones will have to be either put to some sort of creative reuse or hauled off somehow. Apparently, you can't just throw this stuff in the trash (even if you could get it into a trash bucket without making it too heavy to lift); it has to be recycled, and unlike your newspapers and soda bottles, it doesn't just get picked up at the curb. You have to haul it yourself to the nearest reclamation center, which, as far as I can tell, is about eight miles away. And that's assuming that (a) the center still accepts concrete, which isn't mentioned on its website, and (b) an East Brunswick recycling center will take waste generated in Highland Park.

For now, all the concrete is just getting piled up in a far corner of our yard, where we'll eventually sort out the large chunks from the small and try to figure out what to do with them. Brian wants to hold on to them for a while in hopes that we'll come up with some way to reuse them. Personally, I cherish the hope that if I list the stuff on Freecycle, someone will come and haul it away for us. So far it's worked for almost everything else.

More praise for Freecycle

Back in January, I posted about the virtues of Freecycle as a way to get rid of unwanted stuff. Well, now I can also laud it as a way to get new, useful stuff. Yesterday we scored our first ever major acquisition from Freecycle: nearly 1000 cement pavers. The poster was so eager to get rid of them that he even offered to transport them for us in his pickup, which took a lot less time than repeatedly loading and unloading the trunk of our little sedan. So after a couple of hours of lifting and stacking, we now have sore arms, sore knees, and enough pavers to build a 10-by-20-foot patio. Hooray! Now we just need to keep scanning the Freecycle postings until someone offers a few cubic yards of gravel and sand...