Patios and Pergolas
As our boys get older and our family grows we are constantly looking for more space. The days of them playing in small spaces is long gone. They’re big and loud and they have their own amazing personalities. They need more space to become the young men they are becoming and we need more space to do things as a family and just the two of us.
We’ve flirted with the idea of moving to a bigger house. However, we love the schools the kids are in and houses in our school district are tough to find. So, the next logical step is how can we make the space we have more functional for us. In our world, that begins outdoors.
We have spaces in our yard which are not really being used. In fact, they were almost unusable. One of those spaces was a grassy area right off our deck. With two big rescue dogs jumping off the steps and two boys running around the yard the grass had become worn and the resulting bare spots created a muddy mess any time it rained. Marnae thought it would be a good space for a patio, but my impression of poured concrete patios were that they were either too hot or too cold and the idea really didn’t appeal to me. So the idea just kind of hung there for a couple of years. I have a bad habit of just putting off ideas that don’t really appeal to me rather than actually discussing why they don’t.
This is frustrating for everyone, and I do not recommend it. (Hey, I’m working on it!)
Anyway, I eventually told her what the real problem was, and we actually worked together to design a solution. After pricing materials and comparing to some quotes for a poured patio we realized if we built it ourselves, we could put in a nice patio with pavers we liked and could even add a pergola to shade it for less than it would have cost to have someone come pour a concrete slab in our yard. As a bonus, we could design it anyway we wanted and do it as a family. We didn’t have to use a kit or a form or someone else’s idea. We could make something we wanted and that would work best for us. We even included the kids in the design process, not just the work part.
We started working on this project on Memorial Day weekend and we made good progress. We marked and set our four sixteen-foot 6×6 posts by renting a post hole digger and having some help from a neighbor who had used one before. After that we started building a small retaining wall and leveling out the area. We built a trench for the drain spout coming off the house, we set all the patio stones (twice), and we put up the frame for the pergola. If your interested in a how to about building a project like this there are about a thousand YouTube videos from people who can take you through it better than I ever could, but I think you get the idea.
For most of the summer the project stayed just like this. There was a completed patio, and about half of a pergola. Basically, we decided to take a break while we handled summer events, baseball schedules and vacations. But we enjoyed it anyway. It was a rare Saturday or Sunday that Marnae and I weren’t sitting on the patio drinking coffee in the morning and we even figured out we could hang our camping hammock from the posts and swing in the summer breeze. We didn’t worry about rushing to finish. We wanted to have time to do it right and the way we wanted. When Labor Day weekend rolled around, we began the finishing touches. We finished off the pergola with the angled boards we wanted, we put in a path between the patio and our garden and finally we ran electricity to it so we could have heaters for when they were needed and lights for when they were wanted.
We all worked together and created a space we can enjoy together. We had help from our neighbor who will undoubtedly join us on it from time to time. We love it already and we have even used it for one of our outdoor movies. (Star Wars of course)
For some people the idea of doing a project like this might seem impossible. It might seem like too difficult and maybe you’ll just hire someone to do it. That’s okay, someday we might do that on a different project. But, on this one, I’m glad we didn’t. If you’re willing to do a little research, you can figure it out almost any project. It might not look perfect, but you can know you did it and that’s probably the feature I like most about our project. We did it ourselves, we did it together and we did it the way we wanted it.
November 6, 2022 @ 10:39 am
Great article!