Doesn’t that sound fancy? LOL I can laugh now that it is finally up but what a pain in the ass it was getting here!
When we left off – Brett and I had evicted a family of baby skunk from under our old wooden deck and had cut that up and thrown it in na dumpter and contracted with a lovely local home improvement company to pour us a 14 by 15 foot concrete slab. Little did I know there are rules about how much non permeable surface you can have on your property, and that they are especially strict if you are in the “town center” (which of course we are), so when our contractor went to the town to get a permit for this job he was told – No! He persisted and tried to find out what other options there were for him to do the job like maybe patio block, and well – that did not go well at all. In fact. I was told that it escalated to a heated exchange and in the end the guy refunded my money and walked off the job, leaving Brett and I to scramble and figure out what we could do ourselves that counted as permeable surface. 🙁 I have never been opposed to a bit of hard work myself but I am getting older and was really looking forward to just writing the check on thos one. Ughh!!

So we decided to do some minimal cement footings and hand mixed 620lbs of cement in a bucket – one bag at a time. 😛 Next in order to level the area I personally had to buy – and haul an actual TON of topsoil – like literally 50 – 40lb bags – 10 bags at a time in the back of my poor little Versa. Then drag it to the back yard and bring the sloped yard up nearly 5 inches to make a nice somewhat level surface for the new structure. THEN we had 85 bags or so of River stone dropped off by Home Depot and I laid it all out and blended it into the existing pea gravel and stone seating area that we had. And yes – it may seem like I am complaining about the physical hard work that I did – but generally I actually like doing some heavy lifting and sweating a fair bit but this was DAYS AND DAYS of long hard effort. Brett was taking care of a LOT of other things for me at the time, so I mostly didn’t mind hauling bags of dirt and stone around and I liked the laying it out and raking things smooth part. 🙂

What I truly appreciated him taking over was the assembly of the dang solarium! The book was not exactly easy to follow but he did a fantastic job with that and it took us like 2 and a half days at a reasonable pace. Then we got to put the tub back!! (My favorite part!! OMG I missed that thing so much at the end of those hard work days hauling digging and raking. We added a small seating area with a propane fire pit which will be lovely on cold winter nights. I miscalculated how many curtains I needed so we have some more of those en route but over all I am very pleased with it and look forward to put my feet up – relaxing in it in the evening with a glass of wine. 🙂