Vacation Duties

Last year I tried to take Christmas week off from work. I was not allowed. At that point I declared that my next vacation would be two weeks long. And now I am on vacation. I scheduled my first week to coincide with Kit Kat's spring break. That did not do me much good because we sent her to visit grandma for spring break.

So on my week off, I am taking care of as many items on the To Do list as possible. The biggest item is the patio. The far side of the patio is falling down. The reason is the retaining wall holding it up is in disrepair. I tried to ask my handyman to work on this, but he does not do masonry. Then I called our concrete guys. They must have been too busy because they did not get back to me.

The wall is made of lots of relatively thin flagstone. Looks good. But the construction was shoddy. So I have been hauling loads of cinder block and crushed drainage rock from Lowe's to our house with my pickup truck. The only good news was that there was a layer of flagstone buried at the base of the bottom of the wall. I left that in there.

I built up cinder blocks from the base after tearing everything down. When I got to the top, I chose smaller cinder blocks and concrete slabs to even out the top. I made sure crushed rock was directly behind the wall to control water drainage. Everything is a pretty snug fit. Might need to mix some concrete to seal the deal.