We hung the highly-anticipated “hey y’all” from Slippin’ Southern.

We’ve come across some problems trying to get our bluestone pavers. Our original supplier doesn’t have enough of the tumbled bluestone pavers that I fell in love with to cover our patio and can’t order more for an entire month. Balls. We found another supplier (people whom we like much more) that carry cut bluestone pavers (no tumbled edges), but they come in different sizes than the ones we originally designed a pattern with. No problem, right? We’ll just make a new pattern. Nope. I can’t make a nice repeatable pattern with the new stone sizes to save my life! They don’t seem to go together. So! Dinner on me for anyone who can come up with something decent we can use for pavers in the sizes of (inches) 11.5×11.5, 11.5×17.5, 17.5×23.5, 17.5×30.25, and/or 23.5×23.5. Seriously. Someone please save us. I could go into the details about all the various options we have and how unsatisfactory they are for a multitude of reasons, but I don’t want to bore anyone or remind myself of how stressful this is. (We have to figure it out tonight if we’re going to be able to keep moving this coming weekend… eek!)

So since the patio is stalled out, we focused on the rest of the area and pretty much got things wrapped up (amazingly). One of the more important things we did this weekend was to formally name our various projects, which we’ve all been referring to with different and often interchangeable terms. So the official terms are as follows. The Patio is the big thing we’ve been building, and the place where the wedding will occur. The Terrace (or Step Terrace for clarification purposes) is the thing coming off the back of the patio, which is filled with dirt and will have steps and plantings. The Garden Terrace is the place that used to be the patio covered in hexagonal pavers that we recently ripped up and covered in soil.

Garden Terrace

The infamous broken gas grill met its end this weekend.

We finally hauled off the rest of the old patio concrete trim, bits of metal and broken paver  to the dump –  another 1,900 lbs of it.  We used some leftover BelAir retaining wall stone to replace the old, broken, crooked concrete we previously ripped out.

Step Terrace

We hauled compost and filled up the Step Terrace – it’s now ready for planting! One of the steps I’ve been looking forward to!

We also filled in the footprint of the old sidewalk we ripped up at the start of our journey.

It was all hard, dirty work.

But it was a pretty weekend!

Next, we added fertilizer and grass seed to start rehabilitating the disturbed parts of our yard.

Grow, little seeds, grow!

Oh – and I stained the berry trellis. Very poorly. Oh well – you win some you lose some!