Our "new" house is now seven years old, but still the process of settling it into the landscape goes on...and on. It grew up from the wild, rough, glacially hewn rock of our island and is surrounded by a temperate jungle that is always trying to come in the door. We like the way it fits into its surroundings, but we have to set limits. We hired others to build the giant retaining wall for our terrace, and also had the paving for it and for the entrance patio done professionally, but where the door in the living room stepped out into dirt, we thought we could construct a small patio ourselves. It took two years.
Mike and I have always worked well together. I decide how I want something to look, he figures out the most efficient way to accomplish it (sometimes requiring a re-think of the design) and then we make it as best we can. He does the really heavy lifting and I provide a steadying hand and do the running and tidying and small jobs that require patience. The respect each of us has for the talents of the other keep us moving through the endless tasks of fitting our environment to ourselves pretty happily most of the time.This division of labor has led us through garden, deck and various interior constructions through the years and is a pretty accurate metaphor for our life together.
Building the back patio seemed well within our capabilities when first envisioned, but it has shown that time is having its way with us and that strength and energy can no longer be taken for granted. Both of us have had serious health problems in the last few years that have required big changes in diet and attitude. We are coming back slowly, but neither of us has the resilience of youth any more. Climbing in and out of the back of the pick-up takes more energy than it should and carrying pavers and equipment from front to back taxes us completely. The pick and shovel effort of hewing and leveling even a small area requires way more recovery time than it used to. To deal with these humbling realities we divided the patio into four small sections to keep ourselves from being overwhelmed. We did the first two last summer and have finally finished the second two just before the autumn rains began to fall.
The odd angles of our house and the severe drop-offs of our topography led to an angled patio that demanded lots of cutting to get the pavers to fit. We didn't have enough experience to place our pavers without a lot of gaps, so even more small pieces had to be made. Mike is always pursued in his mind by the professionals he imagines could do any job faster and better and sometimes I too wish we could be more finished in our execution, but these little oddities do make our house more our own in the end.
Here is what remains to be done. We need to extend a walkway around the living room to connect the back patio to the front terrace. Maybe next summer.