Darkavich's Daily Ramblings

The backyard work continues!!!!

This project covers mostly the hill. We are cutting away a large portion of the hill and installing a retaining wall with three tiers. As some of you know we removed the Torrey Pine out of the yard. We were left with a stump. The stump was ground down to the hill for not a minor cost and they didn’t do a very good job.

The amount they removed was only about 10% of the stump. The paver folks were left with very difficult task of removing the rest. It was almost five feet deep and three feet wide. The amount of sawdust was incredible. The following picture is of some of the roots that are buried into the hill. Notice the size of the root compared to the head of the worker?

All I can say is these guys earned their pay getting this stump out.

So after a long story (to be summarized later) they started today on the pool surface. Here you can see a fancy rig of water lines used to wash the surface after it starts to setup. It also holds the hoses attached to the pumps to remove the water during the install process.

After they set up the rig and taped off the deck, they started mixing the concrete and pebbles. They mix the materials on the truck then pump it back to the pool.

As the mixture started coming out of the hoses, I was surprised to see that it looked turquoise. Having been prepared for what you see is not what you get, I was patient and would withhold judgement until it dried.

They made quick work of pouring out the mixture. They then trawled and smoothed out the mixture. They used these funky shoes that had spikes on them so they could walk on the mixture and not leave footprints, just spike holes they then filled back up.

The mix started setting after the first hour. You could see where it was starting to cure and getting hard. At this time, they started to wash the surface with a fine mist. This started to expose the surface and pebbles. The change was dramatic! You can’t see it that well in these photos, because the light was too bright, but if you look real hard you can see the pebbles.

So the BBQ parts arrived today. There were a lot more parts than I thought there would be. The island and installer should be here later to do the install.

The pieces for the island all arrived. There are five pieces in all plus the counter.

It took them about 2 hours to put everything together. We ran into some trouble were the gas and water lines where. The inside dimension were not right. They did some on-site surgery and were able to get it fit.

After the island was installed they installed the countertop. The counter was quite large. It took four of them to lift it. I was certain they would drop it.

We have a very cool drink holder and umbrella hoder.

We still need to get an umbrella and base. Here is the finished product.

After waiting forever for the coping stones that we were shorted they are installed and now all we have to do is figure out how to deal with the pool surface…

The pavers are all done except for being sealed.