Other people leave town; then they come back home to that which is comfortable and familiar. I leave town, and Mike considers that an opportunity to tear the place apart.
Case in point. I went to visit my friend Regine for a few days many years ago. I came home to no kitchen. Cabinets out. Dishwasher out. It wasn’t a pretty picture, so I won’t show you a picture.
This time, I left for a business trip and came home to a hole in the ground. A 12’ x 20’ hole, about 8” deep, with my nice new patio table planted in the middle.
The plants from that area had been relocated to temporary homes, aka pots.
The dirt from the hole had been used to raise Mike’s dahlia garden.
What, you may ask, was Mike thinking?????? He was thinking he’d get help and finish a big project in a short time. He was thinking he would surprise me with a completed patio. The best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray.
Still, there was a method to his madness, and astray was just a short delay. The rest of the patio work was done by someone else just a few days after I came home. Yes! We had someone else do work for us. Very much out of character, but such a wise choice. Really, can you even imagine the poor guy moving this 12 tons of gravel by himself?
Mike had built a small paved path for us last year. It took a lot of time, and it was a lot of manual labor. Bringing in the sand and gravel, moving the bricks, laying the bricks, removing the bricks to get the leveling right, laying the bricks again. Sure, he learned a lot and would have eventually finished the patio. But why?
The job was much better left to the professionals from the Hickory Group. Yep, the same guys who did some of our pond work. For both the pond and the patio, Mike is being selective as to which work he is doing, and which work they are doing. They did our patio in one day. One day. Got that? One day!
They did what they said they were going to do, when they said they were going to do it, and for the price they quoted us. I like that.
This was one productive crew.
By the end of the day, it looked like this.
And the next day, it got decorated by Allie.
Has it stayed quite this pretty? Has there been afterwork? Well, let’s just stay in perfect world for now and we’ll talk about that another time.
