And now for something completely different

We're putting in a patio at T's house, in his back yard off the side of his shop. This is probably a long torturous process in the best of times, and of course it's difficult for us for 2 reasons.

One is the lay of the land. This shot is taken from his yard, and I don't know if you can tell from this shot, but there's a marked hilly place directly in the center of the picture.

This naturally means that we have to level this hill and ideally create a slight slope away from the house so that the water will run off the patio into the yard. And this means we had to determine how much of the hill needed to be removed. So we ran a leveling line and I attempted to get a shot that shows exactly how high the hill is, so

This line is level with the concrete pad outside the back door and we have to dig a couple inches down from that to put sand and account for the paver tiles of the patio. This equals about 12 inches - give or take - of this hill that needs to be removed.

Sigh.

This brings me to our second difficulty, which is the dirt, otherwise known as caliche. The makeup of caliche is clay, rocks and dirt and packs down to the consistency of concrete. So here's the system. T. uses a pickaxe to loosen the dirt, I shovel the dirt into a wheelbarrow, T. moves the wheelbarrow full of dirt to a different part of the yard to start the extensive leveling process of the whole yard, repeat, repeat, repeat.

So, here's me (those of you who live here will notice the absence of a landmark behind me)

And here's our progress so far

The stump at the far left and the trench in the middle of the picture mark the edges of the patio-to-be.

Ask me how much I will love this patio when it's finished.