Brick patio (part 1)

During the summer we decided that we wanted to make a patio in our backyard off the back door. When we bought the house it came with a pile of old bricks just sitting in the back corner of the yard, which we thought was awesome. We spent some time cleaning and counting the bricks to see how big of a patio we could make. We knew that this was going to be a pretty big project but we thought for sure we would be done by the end of the summer just in time to enjoy the perfect southern fall. This picture was taken in July, and yes, it is November and we've just barely finished.

Dusty spent a lot of time digging and digging some more, I tried to help once in a while but wasn't as efficient as he was so I ended up just being the cheerleader. Those are all the bricks stacked up by the house.

This was the day we got gravel delivered, we thought for sure we would have some left over but sure enough it all spread out. After we tamped down the bigger gravel we added some smaller gravel on top.

Leveling...

This is the little stool I found at the goodwill for 5 bucks, and boy am I glad I found it because I spent a lot of time sitting here cheering Dusty on while he dug, and leveled, and tamped. I had been wanting to paint a chevron stripe pattern for awhile and this stool seemed like a good way to get it out of my system.

Laying the first bricks! This was a very exciting moment, and I finally got to help out! Dusty and all the strings he used to level the gravel, (he had to move them out of the way to lay bricks)

what an engineer!

I think this was sometime in September....we thought that once we started laying bricks we would have it done in one weekend, but that was not the case! All the bricks were old and different sizes so it was sort of like a huge puzzle.