Here,Now: New Patio, Walkway and Retaining Wall

Our back yard has been a bit of an eyesore ever since we moved in seven years ago but I told Tony this was going to be the year to get it fixed up. One section of our yard goes further back than the rest and Tony thought it'd be a great spot for a patio and fire pit. We cleaned the area out pretty much every year and then always just let it go back to a weedy mess because we weren't ready to deal with it. This year I decided it needed to end. I happened to see someones Facebook advertisement about poured/stamped concrete and decided to give him a call. He came out and we talked about what we wanted and he suggested we do pavers instead of concrete. When I asked why he said that the concrete would likely crack over time and to fix it you'd have to re-pour the whole thing whereas pavers could be dug up and re-positioned. With that in mind we decided to go with pavers.

So, this is what we began with. You can kind of see a bit of a path we'd created with rock we found in our yard leading back towards the fence. In the second photo you can see the area we'd cleared out for what we wanted to be the patio.

Day one began with digging and leveling the patio area and most of the path. At this point we hadn't really decided at all about doing a retaining wall so that doesn't happen until the very end. The first picture is from the front side of my house looking down into the back yard.

This picture is me standing at my fence looking down into the yard to where the patio would be.

And this is mid way down the path to the patio.

On day two they finished digging the path and began laying the pavers. The stone we chose was called Dublin Cobble and the color was Liberty Blend. It has three shapes, square, small rectangle and a large rectangle.

The first and second pictures are from the bottom of my deck towards the patio:

This, of course, is the patio area as seen from the walkway.

And here's a shot from the bottom of the patio looking towards the back of the house.

Day three was all about placing the final pavers and beginning the cut work. They spent the most time on this day because cutting all those edges was no joke!

This is from my driveway on the way to the backyard:

This is going down the front side yard to the back:

Bottom of deck towards patio:

This is looking back up towards the house from the back of the patio:

And this one is from the fence looking up towards the driveway:

Day four they spent finishing the edges, adding the sand between the cracks, filling in the trenches left of the sides and power washing the new stones. Day five (today) they put in the retaining/sitting wall.