Our patio is gone!

Last week the guys came with the bobcat and jack hammer and demo-ed our cracked patio.

That big jack hammer made pretty quick work of our patio even though it was almost 10 inches thick.

Our mason brought his dog "Mud" and he and Otis had fun playing all day and watching the progress.

Once they were done, they brought the dump truck in and removed all the concrete rubble.

By the end of the day Mud was pretty tired out, but Otis was still running around.

They brought in a layer of stone and leveled it out.

At this point we are left with a crushed stone "pad"... and we are trying to decide what to do next.  Patio vs. deck? 

Demolition!!

We have been wanting to take our boring concrete patio out and do something different since we moved in (6 years ago), but haven't had the time or money.  This year with the extra cold winter we had the patio cracked beyond repair and heaved causing our foundation to crack.  Bad news.  But, the good news is now it is a priority to get the patio out and make a whole new backyard space!

This is what we are dealing with:

We had already removed all of the lilies from around the patio when this picture was taken.

The guys are supposed to come this week and jack hammer the patio out and start the repairs to the foundation and in order for them to do that we had to remove the stone facing from around our porch.

I actually started before Ken got home from work and it wasn't really that hard to get off.  I love the demolition process...it's great stress relief!

When Ken got home I decided to let him get some stress relief too.

It only took about an hour total to remove all the stone facing, and we were happy to find a usable porch framework to work with.

Once the repairs are done to the foundation we hope to redo the porch to what it would have looked like in 1880 (even though the original porches were much smaller) and we will also replace the decking with something more weather resistant since it gets water sitting on it and has rotted in quite a few places.

This is what I am thinking as far as the spaces between the posts:

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I believe between the patio and the porches this might be an all summer project for us so I will post updates when things really get rolling, and I plan on posts updating our mudroom situation and other projects we have been working on indoors too.