Back in the sadle: How I spent my summer

I meant to document this through out the summer last year. Of course when you're doing demo work and putting in 320 sq ft of garden beds, time can get away from you. However, it's the winter now and while I'm waiting for the seeds to sprout and the ground to thaw, I can start updating my blog again. So here's how my amazing garden came to be!

Part of the backyard makeover involved taking out a deck and a sidewalk. The old deck was a bi-level deck that was composed of two 18X18 sections. It was fairly unsafe because (as we found out when we were taking it apart) the beams were a little too far apart and the top section lacked hand-railing. I'm sure back in the day, the deck was a big selling point... like if you're a big bbq-er or I don't know, whatever else people do on decks. The deck and the backyard were not the reason we were drawn to the house. Under our care, the deck mostly became a halfway house for foxes and raccoons. Which is clearly what the suburbs needed.

Well we ended up taking out the whole deck (which is where I found out I really like tearing things apart) and I smashed out the side walk. That looked like this.

Seriously, I love smashing concrete

This is what the new deck looks like. We played with some of the porportions and unfortunately this picture is not an in progress one and you can see that we started paving already.

The deck still isn't stained and it's sort of a work surface but it's still a neat deck

We used two different patterns to give ourselves some additional options for parties. The pavers that were put down in a traditional grid form the garden path and the diagonal pavers form a little patio where we have a chimina

As for the pavers, well we took out all of the grass on one side of the backyard and reclaimed the area from the old deck. This is 500 of the 1000 pavers that we purchase to put down between the raised garden beds. We put the beds in first so that we could lay out the pavers correctly. Those boxes by the way are made out of the old deck! It wasn't treated lumber so all we did was sand off any remaining stain and built these amazing raised beds.