Friday, October 31, 2008

Never Say Never

Well, never say never. Not too long ago, I declared that I'd never work on another mosaic in all my life. The entire color coded collection of broken tiles that I had gathered for years was recently given to a very grateful art teacher.

Technically, it's not a mosaic but it sure feels like one...only on a super sized grand scale. This newest project of mine is designing and installing a buckskin flagstone and brick patio in the back yard. The genesis behind the new patio is relocating our old patio to better accommodate the charming cherubic fountain. Our $13.88 small child's wading pool will (sadly) likely be replaced by an official landscape pool, much more suited to all this new work that's going into the patio.

Today, Hilary went with me to the stone yard. Everything was rocks, dirt, dust, and spanglish -- I loved it! The price for the stone has gone up since my last visit, which admittedly was a while ago, but I just wasn't expecting that big a jump. Originally, I had planned on buying approximately 100 square feet of buckskin flagstone. But the price increase per ton freaked me out a bit. So, in order to keep the price down and the square footage up, I figured that picking and choosing thinner pieces of flagstone would do the trick. The silliest part of that was trying to explain it to the guy loading it in the back of the suburban in my limited spanglish.
"Por favor, yo necesito mas skinny flagstone y no necesito el gordo flagstone."
He laughed, and helped find "skinny" flagstone. God bless him.

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