Well, Mark and I had high hopes for our backyard, and it's turning out to be a bigger pain than we had anticipated. We built that mini retaining wall with only a few minor hiccups, and then we moved on to building/extending our patio. Here's the "before" picture, before we even moved in to our house...
You can see the current patio, and then the little grassy area behind it. Well, the problem is, that grassy area is pretty much useless and a waste of space. So we decided to make it into another patio area by putting down some pavers. Easy enough, right? Well, the reason that the grassy area is a waste of space is because the people that planned out this yard completely neglected to factor in any sort of drainage system. And since we live in Wellington, where it rains A LOT, this is a big problem. So with the grass, when we get any amount of rain, the water just pools there and we get a huge disgusting mud pit that takes weeks of sun to dry up (and weeks of sun in a row is pretty rare here). So we thought we would change it to a patio space, and then at least we could still use that area when it rains, and our useable backyard space would increase by quite a bit. Well, obviously, we had to start with the root of the problem, which was the drainage issue... So there actually was a drainage pipe in place already, it just was not put in properly. Which led to this...
Mark had to dig up the entire drain (bye bye lawn), slope it properly, and test it out to make sure we're on the right track. And we're talking digging through clay here, so this is no easy task. Our backyard looks a mess, but finally we think we have the drainage done correctly, and we can cover it up and start the actual patio... because right now, it looks like this...
We really are trying to get this (and the building of the fence) done before July, and really, it needs to be done before May because that's when the winter weather returns and we get lots and lots of rain, so we need to get this finished. Hopefully soon (and by soon I mean in a couple of months) I will be able to upload some pictures of the finished product. :) Pretty soon I'm going to finally upload finished pictures of our decorated house! Probably a "before and after" kind of thing. Although that would require us to finish patching up some of the painting!
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