Updating my house over the past five years has gone fairly slow since I am too cheap to hire labor. There have been a few times when I did pay someone - to lay travertine tile, to lay a tile backsplash, to install hardwood flooring, and to fix a mess in some electrical wiring that I caused by trying to fix it myself ("Typical reason people hire me," the electrician said). I didn't know at the time that the switches were rigged and out of code, so no textbook in the world was going to help me, unless they publish one called "Fixing Electrical Wiring Installed by Color Blind People in the 1960s".

This weekend we tackled installation of a stone walkway in the backyard. It sounded nice and fun and then the work began. Removing about 5-6 inches of dirt and mud, laying the plastic liner, pouring buckets of crushed limestone as the foundation, then building a puzzle of stones to fit together. On Saturday we worked in the rain, which was cooler but muddy, and on Sunday we worked in the sun, which was hot and still muddy. The neat thing about this project: All of the stones came from my backyard, which is rocky on the hillside. That brought the cost of this project down into dirt cheap territory, since we did the labor ourselves. And now I want to pass out and die from exhaustion, and I think I will be very sore tomorrow. I ran out of gas at the 75% completion point. It will be done with another 3 or 4 hours of work. Next spring I'll plant sod in the back since currently it is full of weeds masquerading as grass.

Next project: crown molding in the den, foyer and kitchen. And painting the window trim outside the house, which needs a fresh coat.

After the crushed limestone base was laid.

Inlaid stones in the limestone. The stones will be more visible after it rains.