15. August 2009 by admin.

We went camping with our friends Melissa and Nick this last weekend at Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire.  The hike was pretty intense compared to what we were expecting.  Good company and great food!  Scallops on the fire one night and indiv. pizzas on the fire the next with pudgy piee, smores, and cigars of course!

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15. August 2009 by admin.

I saw this butterfly outside amd had to take a picture or two!

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15. August 2009 by admin.

Since finishing the patio, I’ve been working on two cedar Adirondack chairs.  These are made from  Lee Valley Tolls Plan that I ordered online.  It came with full size templates which made it easy to cut the different curved shapes with my jigsaw.  I stained the cedar with a Penofin red label transparent stain.  It should last about 2-3 years and then have to get stained again.  They came out great!
Here are some builing shots.  On the 2nd chair I decided to stain all of the finished and drilled pieces before assembly.  It made everything easier.

All done!

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15. August 2009 by admin.

Well Katie and I finished the patio a week or two ago and it came out great!  All that backbreaking labor paid off I guess. :)  After excavating the site down about 8″ we started filling the area with 3/4 crusher run which is a compacting gravel with no pieces larger than 3/4″.  We had to put down two layers of about 2-3″ each because the compacting machine can only compact that much at one time.  So here we are filling the site and keeping everything graded at the same time.  These pics are all before the compactor was run over it.

Here I am compacting the 2nd and final layer of the gravel base.

Now we layed down an inch of sand and put the pavers on top.  I layed down 7/8″ electrical conduit on the base and screed sand between them with a flat piece of wood.  Katie would bring the pavers up from the driveway and I would screed the sand and lay the pavers down.  We had a specific design from the TechoBloc the manufacturer so we knew how many rectangle and square pieces to order.  We installed a “soldier” border around the outside of the same style but different color pavers to really set it off.  We were both starting to really get tired at this point lol.

Some finished pics!  After getting all the pavers down I had to make some cuts to fill in spaces where whole blocks wouldn’t fit.  This was not fun at all.  I used a wet tile saw and got just covered in the spray.  A snap edge plastic edging was placed around the entire patio to hold the pavers and to keep the sand from washing out.  These are held in place by 10″ galvanized spikes every 18″ or so.  Alas, all the cuts were made and a polymeric sand got swept across the patio to fill in the spaces between the pavers.  Then I had to compact the pavers twice with the compactor, sweeping the special sand over the whole thing between compactions.  After the 2nd compaction, I made sure there was no sand on the surface and then wet everything down with a mist to activate the polymers that are mixed in with the sand.  Success!

The snap edge andthe soldier border.

Special spot for the grill.

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