The Walkway Begins

Okay, so here is how this began...my mom tells me earlier in the spring that she and Vicki are coming to my house to stay for a week over the summer and they want to do something 'big' for me. My responsibility is to come up with the project and the money to do it. So the brainstorming begins. The first thing that I say is that I would really like better stepping stones/steps in my backyard coming off of my deck(we were in a money crunch during the project and so we just used some stones that we had and I never really liked it) My moms exact words to this are 'this is what I envision' and so the project evolved. I had given it some thought and really wanted the walkway to extend down to my existing swing. That was as far as I had thought about it though. So, my mom arrived on July 4th and we enjoyed a wonderful meal of ribs(completely down from marinade to grilling, by Chris) and corn on the cob and just a leisurely evening. After the kids go to bed, mom and I go outside with the light on to start the brain storming. That night we rake away the mulch and get our pathway semi-etched out. There is a crepe myrtle tree that is directly centered with the bottom of the deck steps and so we decided that this would be the focal point. The idea was to start the walkway at the end of the deck steps, and have it branch off in front of the tree extending to the swing and then a short distance on the other side to give a path to walk between the flowers and down to the rest of the backyard.