Patio laid

I spent $21 on a half yard of mason sand. Spread it and started laying bricks.

I came up about 1-2 wheelbarrows short on the sand. I'll go pick some up soon. After that, I'll back fill the edges and get to work on the cob benches.

Excavating

Excavating was tougher then I thought it was going to be. First off, there was a huge stump I had to dig up. After I got it up, I struggled with the roots. I got it mostly level--I'll let the sand do the rest of the leveling. 

Here we go again!

So here goes. I decided to expand the fireplace. I'm going to do it in three phases.
Phase one: Excavate. In order to do that, I need to grind down the stump of the tree I cut down which is right in front of the fireplace. There's a bunch of ways to get a sump out. There's the expensive way (yeah right) and the poorman's way. I need to dig down roughly 4 inches. I don't see a reason to up root the entire stump, so I'll just take a chainsaw to it and "dig" down a bit.
Phase two: Lay the brick. I was cruising craigslist yesterday and ran into an guy giving away "200+" brick. I showed up at the guys house and started loading them. I ended up loading around 1,000 bricks in two trips.

Phase three: Benches. Right now I use five tree trunk rounds to sit on when we're having a fire...lame. I'm going to build two, maybe three benches out of cob. Something sort of like this. Cob is the ultimate in freebie structure building. All you need is sand, clay, water, and straw. The sand and clay come from the dirt in the ground, water from my rain barrel, and straw from the feed store around the corner. ALL FREE.