Since I moved into my new place a year ago, I've been wanting to do a few things -- make the basement bar even cooler than it already is; put in a patio in the back yard; figure out how to make the back of the house not look like it had been slapped together by a color-coordination-impaired five-year-old with a new bag of Linkin' Logs (TM) -- things like that.
This last weekend, I finally got around to doing some of it. A colleague came in from Kansas and helped put in some flower beds in the front and, more importantly, a patio in the back. And I finally got around to painting the basement steps, which had been battleship gray. Since I spend most of my time on battleships (okay, carriers, cruisers, and assorted other military wessels), I don't really care to look at that color when I get home (this also means that eventually I'll have to paint the front porch, too, since it's done in a lovely coat of the same color).
The biggest problem facing us in our house-upgrading projects was that my car isn't capable of transporting a whole pallet of terra cotta tiles at a time. Fortunately, Home Depot was very good about delivering the very next day -- they charged, but they got here on time and set the pallet where I wanted it. A secondary problem was that Hurricane Ike was spinning around in the neighborhood of northeast Texas and we were getting arms of rain sweeping over us at irregular intervals. Eventually, this would result in several inches of Ike-related rain, but we managed to get the tiles laid before the big stuff hit. We also managed to get quite a bit of painting done. Very exciting.
We cheated a little on laying the patio. The ground was relatively level where we wanted to put it and it already drained well, so we just laid down some weed guard and sat the tiles on it, filling in the odd hole here and there as we went. This saved hours of work, but may come back to haunt my patio in the future. We'll see. Later this week, I'll grab a few bags of sand (which WILL fit in the trunk of my car) and fill in the cracks and crevices in the classic sand (or "dry") method of laying patios. I'll wet down each coat of sand until the whole thing is nearly immobile. Right now, walking across the patio is rather like walking across the deck of a ship -- there's a bit of roll. Not something I want in a patio.
After that, the obnoxious white paint on the room addition in the back got painted red, along with the concrete steps. The broken tiles (there's always broken tiles) got turned into a platform for the barbecue, and then it was just a matter of waiting for the storms to come along and settle the blocks.
Meanwhile, after Mike (the aforementioned colleague) left, I painted the basement steps -- black for the risers and red for the treads. I even threw in some checkerboarding for fun. The next project down there is to paint the walls in that nifty Southwestern Orange that will give it a warm and inviting feel. Warm and inviting would be good, since not very many people use the bar at this point.
Currently, I'm running a fever of nearly 101 F, so I'm not getting much done today, even though it's a VERY beautiful day (70s and sunny), so instead, I'm going to wrap this up and go sit on the new patio.
