We were cleaning up the yard recently and as I admired how nice the yard looks with the patio we put in, I remembered that the post I wrote about it was one of two that were only up for fifteen minutes before they disappeared with the hacking a couple of months ago.  Since this was a really nice project, I want to share what we did with you!

As some of you remember, we decided to make our own brick patio.  There are two ways to lay a patio – one is set in cement, the other is set on a gravel/sand base. We decided to do it with a gravel/sand base, since it’s more forgiving to work with – you can pull something up if you’re not happy with it and do it again; it’s easier, and if you decide to one day use the space differently, then it’s not a very big deal.

I can’t deny that making a patio is a lot of physical work – we hauled 14,000 pounds of bricks and 8000 pounds of gravel, both of which we got free on Craig’s List.  Do you have any concept of how much shlepping that is?!?  Trust me, alot! And then there the ground had to be dug up, which amounted to 10,000 pounds of dirt.  And 10,000 pounds of sand from where it was dumped behind our house to where we needed it in the garden….yes, lots of physical work!

Because we started this project when the baby was six weeks old, the kids did most of the heavy hauling.  I found the supplies, did the driving, organizing, and my share of physical stuff, too, though I tried to do work I could stay in one place for.  Like chipping the mortar off of the reclaimed bricks that we used.   But the kids really get almost all of the credit, particularly my ds16, who took the project from the idea in my mind to reality.  He did the bulk of the heavy work, while also getting his younger siblings involved; they enjoy doing things with him.  Dh didn’t have the time to be involved, though once or twice he came home when we were working and lent a hand.

We now have a lovely brick patio that is about twenty feet by 15 feet (about 320 square feet), that cost us under $400.  My inlaws had a patio and walkway done a year or two ago, which together were a bit under the size of our patio.  And you know how much it cost?  $4000.  Even though their patio looks more professional than ours, it doesn’t look ten times more profesional!

Here’s how the cost broke down: sand – $220 – I ordered 4.5 tons and had it delivered, which was the main expense.  I got a half ton more than we needed to be on the safe side.  But it turns out that we needed another ton, and we ended up having to buy that the expensive way, in forty pound bags from Home Depot.  The additional sand cost us almost $80, whereas it would have been just another $30 if we had ordered more in the first place.  We also ran short of bricks, so I had to buy contrasting pavers.  That was another $60 or so.  We could have made the patio a couple of feet narrower, but the kids really wanted it to be the size they were planning on, so I was fine with it the extra expense and shopping.  We also had to buy a few tools, like a brick set, and a couple of diamond blades for our saw to cut the bricks on the end down to size.  For the frame that the bricks were set in we used lumber from the deck we took apart.  (The rest of the suitably sized lumber became raised garden boxes.)

So all in all, under $400!  If I could have waited to get the sand for free (which I’m confident I could have eventually found), it would have been super cheap (saving $300 of the costs). But my yard was piling up with a mountain of excavated dirt, gravel, and bricks, and I didn’t want my yard to be a long term eyesore for my neighbors or (me!).  I didn’t know how long I would have to wait before I would find enough sand.  Plus, hauling is really a lot of work and we were all feeling kind of run down by the effort to bring the supplies home. Everyone felt the expense to have a truckload of sand delivered very worthwhile!

I also could have saved on the expense of pavers by getting enough bricks when I originally got them, but the bricks had all been stacked in a huge pile, and the ones on the bottom were firmly stuck in the dried mud.  It was the heat of the summer, I was tired and running out of time to be away from the baby (since he was six weeks old so more than two hours was pushing it, and it was over a half hour in each direction to where the bricks were), and I wasn’t interested in prying them up.  So I told my kids we weren’t going to spend the time and energy on it.  They told me then I might regret it if we wouldn’t have enough for the patio, that they thought we’d need them.  I told them I’d take my changes and pay the price if necessary!  And that’s what I did.  🙂

We all agreed that this was worth the time and energy, even though there was a point that it felt endless.  This is mainly because we had to stop for the Nine Days; you know how it is when you stop the momentum on a large project – it’s hard to get it going again.  If we could have had one more day before the Nine Days began to work on it, we could have had it all done without feeling like it was dragging out.  Thanks to everyone’s work, our new patio gave us the room to expand our sukka this year, it looks so much nicer, and the yard looks larger now than it did with the smaller platform deck.  I think it’s because the patio is flush with the ground, and there’s nothing to break up your line of vision when you look out.

And it was hard to beat the cost! 😆

Avivah

>>A totally unrelated question- when you write how much you spend on your food budget each month, I know you’re able to do that because you travel far to get things. I know you mentioned how even with the traveling time and the gas it is worth it financially because of all the savings you get, but i’m just curious, if you included the gas for those trips, how much would your “food and going to buy the food” budget be?<<

I’m answering this as a post because there’s a misconception here that I think other people might also have.  That misconception is that my budget stays low because I travel far to get things.  This is accurate only to a small degree.  I’ve shared about the possibilities involved in saving money by looking for grocery discount stores as one of a number of frugal strategies I’ve mentioned; staying within a budget requires more strategies than one, and this wouldn’t even be my primary one.

So I’m going to clear this misconception up right now, because otherwise some of you will be thinking you can’t keep your budget down because you don’t/can’t/won’t travel to do your shopping!  There are many, many ways to save, and most of them will be useful to most people – I don’t want anyone giving up because they pick out a little detail that doesn’t fit them.

My food budget is firm and always has been, regardless of where I shop.  I don’t stick to it because I can get great deals somewhere, I find great deals so I can stick to it!  Do you see the difference?

About four years ago I started traveling two hours away once in a while in order to buy raw milk, which I can’t get in my state because raw milk sales are illegal.  (At that time, though gas was high, my fuel costs were inconsequential since we had converted a van to run on waste vegetable oil – we sold this almost three years ago, though.)  In order to maximize my time, I eventually began looking for shopping in the area of where I buy my milk that I could do, and after a couple of years it evolved into the way I shop now.

I’ve been blogging for over three years and sharing ways I stay within a budget.  It wasn’t until less than two years ago that I started shopping monthly for the bulk of our food, so clearly this couldn’t have been my main strategy.  Now that I’ve been doing it so long and it’s part of my routine, I probably would continue doing it even if I wasn’t getting the milk; I find monthly shopping very efficient in terms of time, energy, and money.  But I’d still keep an eye on the expenses and savings involved to be sure it continued to be worthwhile.  I doubt I’d go more often than every 2 -3 months.

I use 15 gallons of gas to do my ‘monthly’ shopping.  This is usually done every 5 – 7 weeks, never more frequently than once a month.  With gas currently at 2.50 a gallon, it costs me 37.50 for about every month and a half, which works out to a little over $6 a week.  So it would add another $24 per month to my food costs.  I have a monthly gas budget of $200, and this expense is budgeted for in that category.  When gas was up to $4 a gallon, I went about every 7 – 8 weeks instead, to keep the gas costs in check.

I also have to remind you that though I say that I spend $600 a month, it’s technically less than that since most of the staples I buy last for at least 5 – 6 weeks.  So if I were going to be really accurate, I’d have to say I spend about $450 monthly, with another $24 in gas costs.  But I budget $600 a month and whether I manage to buy  a month’s worth of food with that or enough to last a bit longer, it’s still the same monthly amount that I’m spending.  (Anyway, it’s hard enough for people to believe that I can spend $600 on a family of eleven with a bunch of adult portion eaters without starving everyone; I can just imagine the disbelief a smaller number would engender! :))

As you see, I have taken into account what the travel expenses are and determined that for my needs, it’s worthwhile.  But here’s something I often wonder about when getting questions like yours.  How many people have figured out how much they spend on gas by going shopping every day, or even more than once a day?  How much are they spending by going to several stores every week and buying the loss leaders?  How many people consider how much they spend running around to three different drug stores to use their coupons to buy things they don’t need or want to ‘save’ money?  I know that most people would mentally write off those gas costs without thinking of them as part of daily living, but it’s likely they’re not spending much less! (Most of my driving is highway driving, so it’s very gas efficient.  Lots of small trips in town use more gas because of the stop and go nature of driving locally.)  And how much time are they spending?

I have absolutely no criticism of that approach, since until I started buying raw milk I used to hit three local supermarkets weekly to stock up on the loss leaders. But the above questions regarding gas costs and time/energy output are relevant for everyone consider when determining what their true costs are.

By the way, I integrate outings for my kids into my monthly shopping; I usually I make at least one special stop for them (last time I made two, one in the beginning of the day and one at the end).  I’ve taken them to parks, a chocolate factory, a potato chip factory, a motorcycle factory, a dairy, and a living history museum.  This is another way I maximize my gas expenses; spending the money to go to each of these places on their own would be cost prohibitive, but we can enjoy it as a ‘freebie’.

Avivah