The stumps are gone too

Here the stumps from all the trees behind the house have been ground out. It's a complete mess, but it smells great.

Patio construction starts tomorrow. We're really excited to get started!!

Last BBQ for the old decking

So, the back of the house is a complete mess. It's pretty much a mud pit. I took some of the old decking and made some squares so we could still grill. Here I'm about to make some cedar smoked salmon. It's copper river season after all. We think it's one of America's true delicacies.

I dug the rocks you see out of several of the beds to make room for the stumps to be ground. I've never felt so old trying to dig and move a bunch of big rocks.

The deck in the driveway

After about 100 trips, here's the deck piled up in the driveway. Somehow I manged to tear the deck off the house and carry it to the drive without needing a tetanus shot.

The Deck is Gone

Here's a photo of the house with the deck pretty much gone. It was a lot more work to remove it than I was expecting. But about 100 trips to the driveway later...

The house looks so lonely without the deck. We spent so much time out there. We miss it already.

Our to do list is still quite long and we still have a couple of decisions to make, mostly around the electrical stuff, but we're not too far from construction.

The Deck had to go too

To save a couple of bucks we decided to remove the deck ourselves. It was an incredibly strange deck. It was made of redwood, one of the most expensive woods that you can buy, but it was so poorly constructed that it was becoming unsafe. It's hard to imagine how this once beautiful deck came to be. It's no wonder that its structure was failing. We're holding onto as much redwood as we can. It's a shame that so much of it is rotten.

We have a plan

Working with Nate at KGK Designs, we've spent many months working on a plan. It's a bonus that Nate is graduate of the Architecture program at Kent State. We're doing a dry stacked sandstone retaining wall to hold the patio up. It's going to be almost 4 feet high at its highest point. We're also doing a natural shaped bluestone for the patio surface.

The old deck was in sad shape

The more we looked at the deck, the more we realized that it had to go. It wasn't structured correctly and the railing was completely unsafe. Here's a view from the backyard and from the very backyard.