Backyard TV Show Update – Day 2

Wednesday was our official second day of backyard renovation work, having lots Friday-Sunday to a huge rain storm and Monday and Tuesday to scheduling conflicts. Gino and his crew were onsite by 9 am and the stone distributor Butch from Everlast Stone showed up around 10 am to begin supervising the paver install. All in all it was a pretty smooth day until chaos and pandemonium set in around 4:30 pm. Earlier that day the crew was pretty much done laying the stone down in the lower patio area—they used thinset to adhere the stone and butted the pieces up together so there would be no grout joints and everything was looking great. Things slowed down towards the mid after as they got to the left corner of the patio, where the walls were extremely uneven and all the cuts were being made. Having worked with slate tile before I know all the time is in the cutting. By but around 4:00 pm the floor was completed and the crew began cutting the stone to cover the steps up the garden when ominous rain clouds appeared overhead out of nowhere. The weather forecast up until that point said a chance of light showers but all of a sudden we were faced with big thunderstorms overnight. The plan for tomorrow was to adhere the ledgewall pieces with masonry glue but a quick inspection of the ledgewall pieces showed that that majority of the stone was still soaking wet after last week's rainfall. The glue would not adhere to wet stone and we couldn't leave the pieces out overnight for fear that they would not be dry by the next morning, so the executive decision was made to bring all the ledgewall pieces inside the house and lay they down back side up so they could dry overnight. We raced against the clock to get everything inside and did so just before it started pouring.

Here's what the yard looked like first thing yesterday. Notice how the tarps were not protecting the boxes where the ledgewalls were stored. That is why they got so wet

Here are various pictures of our house littered with ledgewall pieces. It's like a minefield in here!

Ledgewalls in the dining room

Ledgewalls in the living room

Ledgewalls in the basement

That's a whole lot of ledgewalls! At least they pretty much appeared to be dry by the end of the evening.

We couldn't walk on the tiles overnight, so here are some photos from the sunroom looking down

Looks absolutely stunning!

The TV taping portion part of the day seemed to go pretty well. The producers found the need to create some artificial conflict which allowed me to get faux-mad at Gino and take some pretty amusing swipes at him. I hope some of the funny stuff finds its way into the final cut. We did have some real life drama and conflict at the end of the day dealing with the wet stone and the rush to get everything inside. Just goes to show you, why create fake drama when life always finds a way to present you with real drama?