This seems to be my only photo of grading the gravel. You stake out the whole area, string landscape twine between the stakes, hang levels on the lines, and measure down from the lines. A wedge-shaped 2 x 4 with a level on it gives you the slope away from the house.
My notes say: Made a horrible mess of the lawn with the Robot. Feb. 1. Finished grading gravel. What a killing job! Feb 4. Rented plate compactor and compacted gravel.
In the middle of all this, I discover from my scribbled notes, I was starting tomatoes and pimientos from seed and deciding we’d have to stay home this summer because the pimientos would need tlc.
With rare forethought, I realized that painting anything after the patio was finished would be a real pain because you’d have to keep the paint off the steps and pavers. (Which might not be a problem if you’re a tidy painter, but I’m not.) So here I am painting the main wing of the house.
I haven’t touched the garage wing, and I’m not going to because it is two very high stories high, and we don’t need a little old lady with an artificial hip falling off ladders onto the driveway. And Thom’s not going to paint it either. He can hire someone.
This photo shows most of the materials for the patio (from Maxwell Beatty), as well as a good “before” view of the east side of the back garden.
The dump truck that delivered the gravel got thoroughly bogged down in the muddy low spot behind the Savannah holly. It managed to grind its wheels down to the roots of the mulberry we had removed 3 years earlier. Said roots were still very hard and very slippery.
The wooden stakes by the palmetto on the left are part of my system for grading the patio. The whole thing had to drain properly and slope gently away from the house, all of which was quite complicated to calculate.
The gravel pile is in what is now the pond. It’s hard to imagine that I actually moved all that sand and gravel in a wheelbarrow. But that’s what happened.
The JCB Robot rented from Westside Rental made excavating and leveling a lot easier. Not that I was very good at operating it. And I couldn’t figure out how to use it with the landscape lines in place, so most of the grading had to be done by hand. The patio area was 19′ x 41′. I’m not sure why, but that was what emerged when I had done all the calculations about where planters, steps, and pergola were to go. So far, I have spent $3,800 on materials and Robot rental.
