{"id":2198,"date":"2013-05-09T00:04:14","date_gmt":"2013-05-09T05:04:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zingman.com\/blog\/?p=2198"},"modified":"2013-05-09T00:04:14","modified_gmt":"2013-05-09T05:04:14","slug":"patio-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/2013\/05\/09\/patio-project\/","title":{"rendered":"Patio Project"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week was Michelle\u2019s birthday. She\u2019s ten years old now, getting bigger and more helpful and sweeter than ever. She made her own birthday cake from scratch, including pink and purple layers inside and decorated frosting with writing and artwork on top. She’s been getting into watching youtube videos of cake and cupcake decorating ideas, so Jeannie got her a cake decorating kit and helped her out.<\/p>\n

Michelle asked for a bike for her birthday, and I got her a nice shiny red one. Twenty-one gears and nice components. Her first ever new bike after a series of hand-me-downs from her big sister. I got my own bike a for my tenth birthday too. It must be the age where the older sibling has stopped growing and wants to keep their bike.<\/p>\n

We got a new picnic table for our patio on the same trip. Our old one, a cheap plastic thing, got pretty beat up in some storm a year or two ago, to the point where on leg was practically falling off. I had been going \u2018round and \u2018round on what the replacement should be. I\u2019d seen a few nice sets around, but they\u2019re crazy expensive. I was considering making my own, so it would the right dimensions and construction, not to mention more economical, but the labor required was trumped by the patio itself. Then I realized I don\u2019t need new chairs, just the table. Old chairs are cheap plastic too, but they\u2019re great: stylish and well-nigh indestructible. We found a new table that matched them quite well. It\u2019s larger, with room for six, and it\u2019s aluminum, so it\u2019s light and well-nigh indestructible too. And it has a perforated top so it won\u2019t blow over in a heavy wind. We got a matching canopy while we were at it, and the whole backyard scene is quite nice now. Looking forward to the summer.<\/p>\n

The patio itself is coming up on ten years old. I built it with the help of my father when Michelle was a baby. It took us a week, after I\u2019d done the design and prep work on my own. It was a pretty big project, and I\u2019m glad he helped me out. It\u2019s made of bluesstone put together in a pattern over a bed of sand and gravel. The stones are rectangles ranging from 1\u2019 x 1\u2019 to 2\u2019 x\u2019 3\u2019.<\/p>\n

Designing it was fun, like solving a tessellation puzzle. I followed the style of people\u2019s patios around here, and the stones go together according to rules. First, they only come together in 3-way intersections, never 4. Second, two stones of the same shape\/size should not be adjacent and line up. Third, no seam between stones should run in a straight line the whole way through. Lastly, I preferred putting big stones (2\u2019 x 2\u2019 or 2\u2019 x 3\u2019) in the corners. You can see that these rules generate a strong, stable structure that resists slipping or sliding. Of course these rules can generate a large set of patio layouts, so there\u2019s still some art to creating the best one.<\/p>\n

When my dad was here a few weeks ago, he observed that the patio is still \u201cdoing well\u201d, but close inspection revealed that was not exactly the case. When we made it we leveled the ground in the back yard, taking dirt of the high spot and filling in the low spot. Over the years the low spot had sunk again, so the whole thing needed to be leveled up. Basically this involves lifting the stones one by one and putting sand under them until they\u2019re back up to true. The small ones are pretty easy to handle but the big ones are quite heavy and require special care. I used eight bags (400 lbs.) of sand, with the lowest stones being raised over and inch. It took me four sessions of a few hours each. Now the whole thing is nice and level again, and should stay that way a few years.<\/p>\n

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Last week was Michelle\u2019s birthday. She\u2019s ten years old now, getting bigger and more helpful and sweeter than ever. She made her own birthday cake from scratch, including pink and purple layers inside and decorated frosting with writing and artwork on top. She’s been getting into watching youtube videos of cake and cupcake decorating ideas, … Continue reading “Patio Project”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-home-improvement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}