Our Beautiful Patio!

I truly love our beautiful home.  It is absolutely perfect for the two of us, plus a little extra room for an expanding family that will hopefully come in a few years. When we bought our home, it was only a few years old, with not much outdoor decoration.  It made it difficult to decide on how much we liked the outside of the house before we bought it.  We knew how much we loved the inside, but both agreed that the outside was just so "blah."  We decided to jump in feet first, buy the house, and take a stab at what we could do on the outside.

Here's a picture of the backyard before we bought the house.  No, that guy is not Jason.  Actually, I have no idea who it is.  I got this photo off our local PVA site, since I had no "before" shots.  Aside from the lack of patio furniture, this was our back yard until a few weeks ago:

BLAH! So plain!! Ignore the grass too-that's in way better shape now too!

And after all of our hard work, and Jason's finishing touches: TA-DA!
See those blocks of concrete around that larger slab? Jason and I laid those to make the patio bigger, for more room!
My hubby hard at work.
Our pretty new park bench.  I can't wait until that butterfly bush gets much bigger to make that a shady area for reading.
Isn't it pretty? We left that corner open on purpose, to make it all seem to flow together, instead of still having just a "block" of patio.  You can thank my husband on that creativity!

An overall view.  The grill will be on the edge closer to the bench once we put just a bit more sand down to make it more secure.

My boys.  After a long afternoon of finishing touches and chewing sticks.  I'll let YOU decide which boy did what. :)