Hardscaping privacy

Privacy Solution in the works

 We realized pretty quickly that since all of our neighbors had second story decks, we might desire a little more privacy in our garden.  One solution was to build a trellis and train some vines up it.  So Brendan got to work.  The photo above was the first weekend in June.

The next weekend - putting in the vertical slats

The horizontal slats finished and the honeysuckle planted at the base

 Once the trellis was completed, we needed to create a place to enjoy our future privacy.  So we got to work on the patio.  We started by borrowing my parents old 80's truck and filled it up with base gravel.  This was crazy because we had a couple of weekends in a row of extreme heat and that was the weekend for us to do this patio.
It isn't obvious from the photos, but our backyard is actually level with our basement.  So to bring gravel around from a truck in the front yard, we have to go down a few steps from the street to our front yard and then around a full staircase on the side of the house.  We'd invested in a little wheelbarrow and spent the day shoveling, wheeling up and down stairs and tamping down the gravel.  UGH!  By the end of it all, one full ton of gravel had been shoveled, moved and tamped!!
The little pavers you see in the patio were a mistake in the initial stages.  We thought we were going to build a pergola over the patio and would sit it on top of these pavers.  That's another story....

Patio in progress 

We original were going to be putting pavers over the entire patio, with a gravel base.  In the end, we decided we liked the casual rustic look of gravel a bit more.  Most of the pavers we could afford were awfully cheesy anyway.
The decorative gravel choice took a while to figure out.  We finally decided on this really beautiful crushed rock in a light turquoise color.  When it's wet, which is most of the year, it's absolutely beautiful.  When it's dry, it ain't bad either.  I will take a more detailed photo of that and get it up here soon.

Final decorative gravel layer.

 

Our little house at the beginning of last summer