We're off to Malmo, Sweden and Copenhagen, Denmark for a week of work and play...hopefully more of the latter. Read about it HERE.

I really do know where the sun goes. Read about the trip that convinced us to liquidate our belongings, learn French and abandon all that we know so that we too could spend every afternoon sipping cafe and eating sweets in the City of Light.

We worked this weekend on the second and largest patio. I spent all day Saturday regrading the surface to accomodate the thicker pavers. I probably removed around 1-1/2 tons of gravel to lower the grade to the correct height.

 

Sunday consisted of adding back the freshly screened sand, screeding the beds and laying the pavers. At the end of the day, we had layed all of the blocks that we could without significant cutting. There's about 5-6 hours left of cutting the perimeter blocks and drilling holes for the landscape lights.

 

More pictures are HERE.

 

I finally broke down and bought some pavers to finish our backyard patios. There are four separate patios that need paved, with a total area of about 450 square feet. We picked the Avanti collection made by Unilock. These concrete blocks are each 19 inches by about 11 inches rectanglular, with a notch taken out of one corner to allow them to interlock. The faces have a pattern etched into them to make them look like clusters of smaller blocks. There are four different patterns. Each block weighs around 45 pounds, and we ordered about 350 of them, totalling nearly 8 tons.

 

I built a rather intricate elevator-like device to transport each block from the driveway to the backyard, which is over 20 feet below. This made moving them less brutal than physically carrying them down the hill, but it was slow going - it took several days to move all of the blocks this way.

 

The real kicker in this project is the fact that I had originally planned to use 2-inch flagstone for the pavers. So, last spring, I graded everything accordingly and layed in an inch-deep sand bed upon which to set the stone. Alas, I chickened out with the flagstone and went the man-made paver route, which requires a little less skill to lay. Unfortunately, the pavers are 2-3/4 inches thick. Therefore, I have to lower the grade of all of the patio beds. This is not trivial. It requires that I first remove the sand bed, then remove about an inch of the gravel base, then replace the sand. Of course, the process of removing the sand results in contamination of the sand with gravels, which have to be screened out (I built a sifter to do this). And, of course, I have nowhere nearby to store the sand while I remove the gravel, so the whole process involves moving lots of sand and stone all over the yard. It's as if I designed the most inefficient way possible to do this...classic.

 

So, we got started on the first patio in late September, and over the course of a few weekends, managed to get all of the regrading done and the stones set. The actual stone laying went fairly quickly, except the perimeter, which involved a lot of cutting. I used a diamond masonry blade on my circular saw and did all of the cuts dry. This is noisy, dusty and slow work - I spent about eight hours one Sunday doing nothing but cuts. I'm considering buying a wet-saw to do the rest.

 

The other challenge has been integrating the landscape lights into the pavers. After a couple of different approaches, I finally settled on drillling 5/8-inch holes into the blocks with the hammer-drill and inserting the lights directly into these holes. This requires cutting and resplicing the power wires for all of the lights, which adds some more time to the project.

 

Eventually, I will have to fill in all of the joints with polymeric sand and seal the surfaces. This may not happen until next spring. For now, it's on to the next patio - one down and three to go.

 

More pictures of the first patio are HERE.

 

We spent the last week or so making a countertop for the basement cabinets that I've been building all year. I decided to make it from scratch, rather than do the logical thing and buy a nice factory-made countertop. So, I bought a 4x8 sheet of particle board, a couple of sheets of laminate, a gallon of contact cement, a fancy laminate roller, a carbide knife and a special router bit. When all was said and done, it came out OK, took about 10 manhours and cost me a little more than I would have paid for a pre-made top...that's about right.

 

 

The three-year fence project finally comes to an end.

 

Finished the block work on the retaining wall.

 

Built a footer for the latest retaining wall.

 

Some gardening, building a compost bin and starting the final section of the fortress.

 

Spent the day mixing up soil-less dirt for the raised beds.

 

We've spent the last couple of weekends preparing the side yard for a season of gardening folly. So far, we have built a cold frame and a series of raised beds. Click HERE for more.

 

 

I've spent the last month or so working on my cabinet-building technique. I just finished building the fourth carcass for a series of storage cabinets for the basement. I have one more to go.  I also still have to build the drawers and doors for each one...I'm putting that off until I finish all of the frames.

 

Each generation of these has been an improvement over the former one. However, I'm still not quite ready for prime time. All except the first are assembled using biscuit joinery. The first one I built using dado and groove construction...I'm a much bigger fan of the biscuit assembly, and I think that will be my preferred method when it comes time to build the real thing inside the house.

 

 

 

Here's my first attempt at building cabinets. This monstrosity is destined to be a cat bathroom. It will house three litter boxes and have a door in the side for the little beasts to come and go. I'm sure it will eventually have a ventilation fan, motion-activated lights and a Bose sound system by the time it's over.

 

This was my chance to learn some of the basics of cabinet building, including biscuit joinery, router work, clamp-and-glue framing, and cutting plywood panels square and accurately (easier said than done). The ultimate goal is to build a hutch and shelves next to the fireplace in the house. Before that, I have a few more "practice" projects in the basement...next piece will focus on the famous dado joint.

 

  

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