The Holiday Project

I didn’t see any fireworks over the Fourth of July weekend. I saw lots and lots of bricks though.

That’s because I finally got around to that landscaping project that kept eluding me. Or, more accurately, the first phase of it. This involved taking up about two dozen landscaping timber pieces (which I loathed, hated and despised), chopping them up for disposal, and replacing them at the edge of the concrete slab our shed sits on with brick.

When I started, the area around the slab looked a lot like this. (This is an older photo, pre-pimped shed -- notice the dimple in the back wall -- but you can see how the timbers were used.) The timbers ranged from 3 to 4 feet in length and were stacked two deep.

I started working on Sunday but the on again/off again rain which eventually blew in as a storm around 5 p.m., meant that I barely got the timbers removed and chopped up. In between mini-showers and sunshine on Monday (the Fourth) I was able to get prep work under way AND lay down the short side of bricks.

I think there were originally timbers there when we bought This D*mn House and that these were the replacement models. Like they did everything else, the POs did this in a weird way, too.

Apparently, on the shorter side, they didn’t dig as deeply as on the longer side. This meant that I had to stack two rows of bricks on the shorter side, but three rows on the longer one. And, it meant that I had to stagger them so that I could get the 90-degree intersection of the two sides to meet up.

With some patience to get them as level as I could (which wasn’t all that level in some cases) by digging or filling in with a sand/mortar mix, I finally got them to line up. I still need to go back and mortar the lines a bit, but it all seems to have dried nicely.

I don’t know about you, but I like the bricks a thousand times better than I ever could those stupid landscape timbers!