Batman's surprise

You didn't think I'd forget, did you?

So Batman is a big HUGE fan of having fires in the backyard. Not the "burning your house down" kind, but the "sit around, have a couple beers and good conversation" kind. For the past 5 or 6 years we've had this dinky little fire pit that has sat on our deck. We'd huddle around it, praying it was far enough away from the house not to catch anything, and have a great time with friends and family. Winter or summer doesn't matter. We'd get it going and it was almost like camping, only without all the packing, driving, unpacking, set up, repacking, more driving, etc.

So me in my BRILLIANT wisdom thought how nice it would be to have an in-ground fire pit in the yard. And then that expanded to a cobblestone patio too. Me and my grand ideas...

Anyway, it turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself. It was a TON of work (not difficult, just a lot of manual labor), but well worth it.

And Batman was REALLY surprised. He had made a couple guesses as to what my project was (swing set, fountain), but he was blown away when he came home and saw it (which of course also made it worth all the work).
Here are a few pictures on the transformation:
I forgot to take an official "before" pic, but this was is sort of close. I had only dug out the perimeter and a small section of the grass

Almost all the grass gone!

(the "hole" is about 12 inches deep, just for a point of reference)

In went 6 inches of road mix gravel

Then a few inches of sand (and obviously Little Miss helped out)

 The mostly finished product (sorry about Kino's butt in the background. He was terrorizing my neighbors chickens), just needs a layer of sand to hold the pavers in place.

And the finished product. We took for a test drive on Saturday and it's pretty awesome ;-)

Just disregard the fact that we need to mow...