Landscaping #2: Stoned

Holy crap, I’m tired. The rocks came Sunday, the boulders were delivered mostly into place. The delivery guy and I used leverage and careful shoveling to get the last 6” of fine adjustment on that big one, which I’m told weighed in at 1600 lbs. The littler one I can move, kind of, and we’ll be adjusting location.

The flagstones themselves probably ran up to about 200 lbs, so i could move ‘em carefully. Charlene and I spent most of the day carefully leveling out the area, lifting up a stone, scooping and raking sand back and forth, then lowering it back down. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Then we went about trying to cut smaller pieces to fit in the cracks. This stuff doesn’t like to cut with a cold chisel, it splits into sheets instead of breaking, so that mostly involved an angle grinder and a diamond blade and a lot of really nasty dust. Gave the squirt bottle a workout.

I’m really sore now, but it’s starting to look good, and now we can go about planting.

That content on my personal site.

Further background that I missed here and on Flutterby.net: Previous to this, I’d put in a layer of landscape cloth, 6-8” of gravel, packed with a power tamper, another layer of landscape cloth, 2-3” of decomposed granite (coarse sand), screeded and packed with the power tamper, and then another inch or so of decomposed granite loose and soft. Mostly what we were doing in our leveling process yesterday was rearranging that top inch of granite. Even though after a rainstorm or two it wasn’t all that loose and soft any more.

-- Dan Lyke, Petaluma California, http://www.flutterby.net/