After three years of “getting around to it”, we finally have a new patio. For those that don’t know, when we bought this house, there was this craptastic concrete pad off the carport. It was really awful and they clearly just dumped concrete in it. Seriously, there were like bricks and branches and all kinds of things they just poured concrete over.
So a couple months ago I had someone finally bust up that pad and it was a couple months before we had the money to do a new patio. The first plan was to do the whole thing ourselves. That went out the window pretty fast. Next, we were going to just hire someone to do the prep work, digging the base and laying the gravel, etc. But the difference between having them do that and doing the entire thing was two hundred bucks. So I decided to just hand the whole thing over to someone else.
And boy am I glad I did. The first day into their work I realized doing this right is not easy and I surely would’ve botched it. I’m pretty happy with the results, which are 10 times better than I could’ve done. And kudos for the landscapers, as I’m sure they cursed this project more than once. This is an old house, and even though the patio is square, nothing about the house is. So they really had to get creative to make certain things work.
Next challenge, get some grass to grow!
This is kinda old news by now, but FireBox Studios just won another design award. This is our third TIGAR award in a row, and we got this one for the site we did for the 
