A Day in the Life: December 2010

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

So...

Someone once told me that if your marriage can make it through building a house it can make it through anything. I'm starting to understand what he meant. We are only adding a patio to the house & it is frustrating and stressful.

I'm not sure how well it has shown up in the pictures, but the pavers are crooked. The first set of steps are flush with the house, but the second set of steps are out of square by 2" apparently. When they set the pavers they lined them up with the second set of steps, so in the end it made the steps by the house look off. Then, to make things worse the pavers on the lower patio are at a slightly different angle. All these slight angles confuse the eye. On top of that, the arcs on the top patio are different. You probably wouldn't be able to tell once you got the barbecue pit and a table & chairs on it but it just adds to our dissatisfaction.

I spoke with the owner today and he came out to look at things (that is when we figured out the 2" out of square). We decided to have them re-lay the top patio and reset the second set of stairs to make the square. This should eliminate all the different angles we're seeing. They are making no promises about the arcs being the same. I want to give them a piece of string and a geometry lesson. Hopefully one of us will be here when they cut the stones.

Overall, the plants are a lot smaller than what we were lead to believe they would be and the spacing on some things were off. I talked to him today about it and hopefully it will all work out. I just hate hearing that the reason the plants are smaller is because they didn't have any larger ones in stock.

All in all this is a big investment for us and something we will have to look at for a very long time, so we just want it done right. Hopefully the rest of the process will go smoothly.