Quick post with pics

I don't have the mental energy for a real post today, but I do have a bunch of pics I've been meaning to put up here, sort of a follow up to the whole series of patio posts. The first one is a bit gruesome (once you know what you're looking at). The deck was very spongy when Quin tore it apart (although that's not why we pulled it out - the reason was to improve the water drainage so it would flow out into the yard and not into the house). Once it was gone, the carpenter ants that had been infiltrating it for years moved into the house. About a week after the Orkin guy came the ants started falling out of the overhang under the sliding glass door. I'm glad they went outside to die in great twitching piles, and I'm not thinking about how many corpses are stacked up in my walls. *shudder*




For this one, you need to compare to the before picture I took (the third one I posted here). I told you we had mutant grass; those tracks are completely gone. (Well there was some seeding involved, but not much, really).

The last pic is of the patio itself, plus the patch that used to be patio but is now dirt. Do you see the diagonal line in the dirt? Everything on the house-side of that line is actually dirt mixed with concrete and angled to drain away from the house. That's going to stay dirt with paving stones and some sort of rock garden type thing. Perhaps you can tell by my vagueness, this is my husband's project. But I've been promised a bench under the arbor vitae so I can sit in the shade and write.