Mindy Carlson

Build a patio, that is.

For as long as we’ve owned the house we have hated this little triangle that is outside of our the fence in the yard. Mark informs me that I’m the only one who has hated it. He has just been ignoring it and pretending to be Zen about it.

Back when we originally bought the house my sainted father-in-law Ken said the first thing he would do it to move the fence over to the actual property line because we will never use that space outside of the fence. Mark and I assured him that oh, yes, we would. We’ll turn it into a Japanese meditation garden! We’ll put in a bench! We’ll have coffee there! It will be lovely!

Well, fast forward 10 years and we have done absolutely nothing with it. We have never put a bench there. Mark has never sat there with coffee. It certainly is no Japanese meditation garden. Actually, it’s infested with mosquitoes and every time I go past there I get 10 mosquito bites or a spider bite and end up cursing nature. I go there exactly once a year to hack back the foliage and make sure the forsythia doesn’t migrate into the neighbor’s kitchen.

For the past 3 or 4 years I’ve been begging Mark to follow his dad’s original suggestion and move the fence line and then put in a slate patio. And for 3 years the answer has been no. Not interested. Whatsoever. But last year the answer changed to a ‘Maybe.’

And I knew I was getting a patio.
The first step in this whole process was to rip out the plants from the overgrown jungle area. Mark took the lead on that and got some help from E. He was so pleased to be given clippers that he didn’t mind getting hot and so dirty it required a bath the minute he got inside.

Here’s a picture of it half-way done.

There is a huge fence of ivy just off to the left.

;

Mark and E are mostly through clearing it in the above picture.

Daddy’s good little helper.
The next step was to put in a new fence that would prevent people from plummeting over the side the retaining wall and falling about 7 feet.

Stay tuned!!  The next step is to clear the bricks and put in a little retaining wall to hold back the ivy!