Relax! Enjoy the Patio and Fire Pit

 

Relax!  Enjoy the Patio and Fire Pit

I have now owned the Main Street Bed and Breakfast for four years.  For those of you that don’t know me, I enjoy gardening as much as time allows.  So, over the years I have made some minor improvements to the outside landscape.  But, this year I really wanted to create a pleasant space for my guests to relax and enjoy the backyard.  I started by planting another ten Arborvitaes along the south border to block the funeral home parking lot and give more privacy.  I just have to watch that trucks don’t back into them! 

In May I hired Pablo Ginez of Orbis Terrarum to build a brick and stone patio around the existing cistern.  The cistern has been capped by the city but we were curious to see if it could be filled in so we took the cap off to look inside.  We found it’s a brick well that probably goes down about 20 to 30 feet!  Needless to say, we will not be filling it in.  I just hope the cap holds!  I removed all of the grasses that I had planted around the cistern and gave them to a friend to divide and distribute to anyone interested.  Then Pablo and Elle started digging out the grass to level out the elevation.  He  built the outside frame and wall out of stone then filled in the middle with old brick that I had to find from several different locations. It took a couple of tries to figure out the pattern to use since the bricks varied in size and composition.  But I wanted to keep the look consistent with the 200 year old house.

There were a couple days that delayed the progress due to rain, but it only took about a week to finish the project.  After completing the patio Pablo worked on a pathway leading to my storage shed.

I built some Adirondack chairs to use for comfortable seating around the patio and reused the concrete benches I had around the fire pit before starting construction.

I was in Indianapolis for the Indy 500 and made it back just in time to sit around the inaugural fire on the new patio.

Since then, guests have been enjoying their morning coffee out on the patio.