Greetings! Welcome to #WeekendCoffeeShare, thank you for meeting me on this Saturday. Let’s take this chat inside. According to the weather app on my phone, it looks like it might rain today.
According to mom, I laid 104 bricks this week. From upstairs, it certainly doesn’t look too bad. It even looks like I’ve done a decent job. Not according to mom. After she complained about my bricks being uneven, her words went to my head and I ended lifting most of the bricks by the new pollinator patch (the square bed by the fence) last night and will be redoing them today.
When I was an engineering student, I remember vividly about a story one of the instructors told us on the first day of the class. It’s a story about a teacher ordering a square-shaped piece of plastic measuring 1.000-by-1.000 inches and it costed her $1000 when it should’ve costed her $1 because of the zeros behind the decimal point.
Having laid bricks all week, I finally realized why those zeros made such difference. According to the tag at the store, the 16 inches bricks actually measured 15.6 inches. When I measured it with a ruler, I thought there was something wrong with me or the ruler. Like I said, those zeros behind the decimal matter because some of the bricks were longer or shorter than others, making it difficult to laid sometimes.
I ended up needing to fill the bigger gaps with the pile of the excavated soil sitting in the new garden bed. Not a bad way to reuse this crappy clay soil and I have no doubt once enough water seeps through, it will act like cement between the bricks.
You know what’s funny? From the top, I feel like I’m half-way complete with this project but in reality, I’m only about a-quarter complete though I imagine it should move quicker once I leveled the ground and construct 2 more garden beds.
If we were having coffee, I would tell you mom gave me a deadline – finish as much I can by Monday and wait until we return from Japan to finish the rest. She doesn’t want me to go to Japan with sore muscles but the thing is, my muscles aren’t sore right now, though I imagine they will be once I sit on a plane for 11 hours.
Anyway, I guess I have my work cut out for me. Better get to it.
#weekendcoffeeshare is hosted by Natalie of Natalie the Explorer. I appreciate you stopping by. Until next we chat. 🙂



One good guess of mine behind the 16 inch brick being really in 15.6 inch size is the rounding off method.
You did good by filling those missing gaps with clay.
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I don’t know about that but I just spent today trying to fit the bricks together and it wasn’t an easy feat, being that size does matter.
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I think your yard looks amazing!
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Thank you.
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This looks fantastic!
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Thank you. 🙂
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This looks great–you have done so much work!
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Thank you.
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That’s a lot of bricks! I’m impressed you did all that work and don’t have sore muscles. I’d be flat on the floor, unable to move.
I hope your trip to Japan goes well!
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Well, I think the thing was I did just a little bit every night, enough to get something done but not enough to put strain on muscles. My mom gave me a deadline, though, to finish it last weekend and trust me, my muscles are sore now.
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Sounds like a smart approach. Sorry you’re hurting now—hope your muscles recover quickly!
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I’m still a little bit sore but I think I will recover soon.
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