Our New Patio

Welcome to the Great Outdoors! I have taken you on the journey of our interior remodeling of That 70s house, but you didn’t think I would stop there did you? I’m always looking for a new way to make our house more beautiful and our yard is no exception. We are very lucky to live in an AWESOME climate (I swear it doesn’t snow as much as you think) and we really enjoy being outdoors, especially in the summer since we have no humidity. When we first bought That 70s House, the outdoor space was a bit depressing to say the least. Very little had been done and we had our work cut out for us!

One positive I really liked about That 70s House was it had a covered patio. The patio itself was fine but definitely nothing special. The main problem I had was the area to the right of our patio. It sloped and was not usable, but the worst was this hideous mulch (if you can even call it that?) from the 70s/80s. It looked like pieces of bark, literally like someone shaved a tree. It was awful and it HAD to go. The question was, what do we do with that area? We originally thought we would give our patio a mini makeover and frame it out in some bricks, maybe do a small extension and landscape the yard with some real edging and just make it pretty. The “bark spot” was the hard part. We wanted to make it usable but weren’t sure what we could do on our own. Then we went to the Denver Home and Garden show. We stumbled upon a paver patio booth and started chatting with the guy. He was super likable and had a book full of pictures of projects they had done and they were pretty cool! So much better than we could do. Barry LOVED the idea of someone else doing this work. I was worried about cost.

Nonetheless, we set up a time to get an estimate. In preparation for our estimate we started thinking about what we really wanted and when it came down to it, we wanted A LOT! Especially if we were going to pay someone else to do it! I really wanted an extension where we could have an outdoor sofa seating area with maybe a fire pit. Barry liked the idea of a built in grill and I fueled that idea with an eating bar off the back of it. But most of all, we needed a solution for the bark area. I played around with a few designs and saved them in excel. If you have been reading along you know about my excel designs 🙂 Estimate day came and we discussed all our hopes and dreams for the project. I showed the rep my excel plans and he laughed………I was officially his first client to have “drawn” him an excel design. The greatest news was we could build up the “bark spot” with pavers to be on the same level as the rest of the patio and just add on. This is what I really wanted and it could have a seating wall! We would also get a built in grill with a bar off the back, 320 sqft of new patio and they would cover 160 sqft of our existing patio for a grand total of 480 sqft. Sounded great! Below is my excel design 🙂

Now price. I am not going to lie, this was not a cheap project and my initial reaction was “NO”. Then I researched how much it would cost us to do the same thing on our own just a little less fancy. The number I came up with was $2,000 less than it would cost if we hired it out, not to mention the fact that it would probably take us the entire summer and maybe some couples therapy to complete it. This changed my mind. It would take them about a week to complete the project. We were sold. Disclaimer: we did have more than one estimate but really liked this company the best.

Day 1 of install……..We were super excited to get this started!!! Sadly, it was a little bit of a gloomy day.

It was the end of April so there was always a possibility it could snow……and it did. The guys had to cover everything up and come back a few days later.

Three days later they got back to work.

The next day I came home from work my patio looked like this! They were really making progress 🙂

The next day it looked like this.

 

The final day they had the grill built in and the seating wall was done. We were so excited to use it for the first time!

Now I just needed to decorate it a little bit with some furniture and accessories. This is always my favorite part!

 And this is what it looks like today.