If you had asked me a few years ago how excited I’d be about putting in a new patio, I would have probably answered, “Not much.” But after the mammoth job of “manifesting” our custom passive solar home here in rural southern Colorado, and starting in May to find someone local to put in a simple concrete patio…

…this is a thing of beauty to me!

I started out in May calling five contractors. Nobody responded. I called them again and most said they lost my phone number. We finally chose one in mid-July and he came over to look at the job. He gave us an estimate and then never called us back.

In the end I had to find a guy in our neighborhood to work with my brother John on the project. The bad news? It took five months to complete. The good news? The cost was about half of the previous estimate.

This morning, when I went out to check it all out, I found what looks like a bobcat paw print in the fresh concrete. How cool is that?   Whoops! That’s the contractors fingerprints in it!           In case you’re new here, I just came out with a memoir of the extreme ups and downs of moving to the Colorado outback to build…  Please go check it out!