And it continues

So our small backyard reno turned into something slightly bigger.  There were countless trips to the dump to remove the dirt and I can't even begin to tally how many back-breaking hours that were involved.  Steven & John dug dirt during the day and I helped when I got home.

Our big joke when we started digging the hole in the backyard was that Steven would dig more at night and then carry a rolled up carpet into the backyard in the middle of the night.  Then he'd casually start to mention to people that "my wife has gone away.  I'm not sure when she's coming back."

Then the hole got bigger and bigger as the project slowly took on a life of its own.

Then we got gravel.

And shoveled the gravel into the gigantic hole in our backyard.  Right around now, we started thinking that perhaps we should hire an expert.  Well to be fair, I thought about hiring someone during the early days of this project but ahem, someone didn't agree with me.

And then we hired someone.

But due to unfortunate scheduling and inconvenient weather the job wasn't started.

This is how we left our backyard when we went on holiday. 

So when we returned, the job finally got started.

We stood and watched for so long, I'm pretty sure we pissed them off.

We tried to make it up with popsicles, ice cream sandwiches and beer.

Isn't it gorgeous?  Yes I know, there's that small sad little patch of grass in front of the garage but believe me, we have BIG plans for that space. 

Our first purchase for our new "outdoor living space". 
The chiminea.  You'd think that this would be something easy to buy.  You could think that but you'd be wrong.  We looked high & low and near & far only to discover that of course these were popular a few years ago but not any longer.  But Steven found a wonderful store. 

Doesn't this look great?