Patio perfection and the tales of Superhead!

  Well what an incredible 2 days these have been.

Some of you may remember that we were looking at having a new patio. Nigel drew out a design and we had someone round to quote for it. I guess we were lucky we were able to see the funny side of the quote! I mean almost £11,000 for a patio!!! I don't think so.

We couldn't afford it and even if we could we couldn't justify spending that much.

If we couldn't have the design we wanted - and it was the design that was making it so expensive as there was not a straight line in it and it was all eged and the cutting alone would have taken for ever, let alone filling in steps, building retaining walls etc - then we would make the best of what we had.

Our existing patio is too small and square, but it is what we have so time to make the best of it. It was filthy - the pine trees etc make it awful - and we hadn't cleaned it for two years. The edge was all pots full of my very extensive collection of dead conifers (I built that up over several years you know!) and the pots were all dirty and grimy too. There were weeds growing up through the cracks. It was a mess.

So two days of hard graft and it looks so much better. Nigel pressure washed it all, including the pots. You can see from the one he wrote his name in how vile it was.

We moved everything around and I went and bought new conifers to kill and we planted everything up.

We now have a useable patio that is clean and pleasant to sit out on. We have yet to unpack the new patio furniture but we will do that when we can move again! Should only be a couple of days before we heal!

The old furniture has now been put in a really nice spot outside the kitchen window that was just a dumpuing area and now is a second lower patio area.

I am really thrilled with it. We have worked hard but it has been worth it.

I have also worked hard on one of the two Shimelle My Freedom pages this weekend.

I am still struggling with doubles and could not get this to work at all. I had some fairly major gaps that needed filling.

I have adopted a very lighthearted approach tot his one and decided as I loved Superhead's body so much I would include her in the page.

As per the suggestions I wrote the journalling as converations. Some of my job is inevitably boring and mundane - isn't some of every job? I do, however, get some fairly bizarre things to deal with as well and so I have included a few of those too.

Now - I am off to heal my aching muscles with the best known cure in the world .... feet up, a good book and a glass of ice cold wine!

Comments

[Carrie]

Wow - great work on the patio! It's beautiful! Hope you get to enjoy it soon now! :)

Love the layout! So pretty! Love the "superhero" embellies!

[Mandy]

Very resourceful on the patio front! I've posted a LO for prompt 2 to our Flicker group :)

[Liddy]

Love the patio, what an inspiration, very cool. Also can you tell me (cos I've obviously missed the info) your Month Book, are you doing this digitally, printing and making into a book? Silly question I know but I've been toying with an idea like this for a while and I love yours so I'm curious.

[Carrie]

Hey you've been tagged! Come see the 27th post! :)