Brick paving around the guava tree

In February and March John had dropped to working part-time in order to run our remodel. Or so we had planned. It turned out that his canceled project at work was suddenly funded, so he ended up working almost full-time after all. He didn’t get the remodel done, but he did do a fun and beautiful project in the backyard.

We had an area of our back patio that had been cemented over at some point in the past with a cheap cement that didn’t match the rest of the patio. It was also a low spot, prone to flooding. We could have installed a drain, but instead we decided to remove most of the cement and plant a tree. We got the cement removed, but the project stalled over the winter, leaving a mud pit. Biska loved the mud, but John and I didn’t so much!

Finally this spring when John had some time off, he was able to install a big pot with a pineapple guava tree. Next step was to pave around the pot.

It took John two trips to get the heavy pallet of bricks home.

The area we needed to pave was an odd, lopsided rectangular shape, and we had just put a big round pot in one corner.

Here we are with little paper rectangles, trying to figure out how to arrange the bricks around the pot.

After we settled on the design, John went to work, leveling and setting the brick. As is common in the desert, he sanded the brick in rather than using mortar. That will help the area drain during our occasional but sometimes intense rainstorms.

Here he’s cutting the brick to fit the edges. I figured he could just leave the edges rough because I planned to plant herbs between the pathways anyway, but John is detail-oriented and likes to do a good careful job.

Buying plants is my favorite part of yard projects.

Next he added irrigation lines for the guava tree and my herbs.

After the herbs were in, he bolted a patio umbrella into the cement in the perfect spot to shade the pool steps. Ta-da!

Wow, that is a lot nicer than the muddy pit we had before. Good job John!

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