The Back Stoop - Done! (Well, for the most part)

What a Difference!

As a reminder, when I started the back stoop, which seems like forever ago, it looked like this:

So it was time.  At the end of the last post, the stoop was looking like:

It was getting there.  Really, all I had to do was paint, but if you know me - I......hate.....painting!  Stain on the floorboards and two coats of B-I-N primer, and two coats of paint later, here it was (of course Linus supervised throughout):

Oh, just a quick step backward - here's the stoop without the doors.  As you can see the mower and some other things are stored below:

What you can't see here is that the storage runs the entire length of the back porch, more storage is always good!  Anyway, I showed you in the first post about the stoop that I had built the doors, so all that was left was to paint them (of course - ugh) and hang them.  

Aaahhhhhh, so much better - or was it?  The pad outside the stoop looked like, well Ma will be reading this so - it looked like (insert your own word).  I hate when you do a project, stand back and it looks nice and then the surrounding area brings it all down.  The area outside the stoop has always been a problem-area.  Back in the day, we even used an old rubber welcome mat:

Then a number of years ago a neighbor took down his old stone fire-pit, so some of them ended up outside the stoop. But the area ended up looking like this, which the other day was driving me batty!

Off to Lowes!  First I graded the area, then laid down some recycled landscape fabric to try to keep some of those horrid weeds down!  Then I had to even out and neaten up some things with a little concrete (no precision work here!):

Then it was just a matter of putting in the pavers:

Nice huh?  All done yeah?  Ooooof course not.  Look at this:

Do you see it?  See on the right side of the picture?  I have always hated how there was a veritable cliff down to the pavers, it's always been like that.  So, once again I had to do something about it.  So I thought I would just put a small slope leading up to the pad to make it neater and easier to mow.  

Then just a little grass seed...of course when you have this guy - 

there's no way in the world grass would grow unless one took a bit of precautionary measure:

And THAT should be the end of the Back Stoop project.  Maybe.  I hope.  The beauty shot:

And a Before/After shot:

And finally, a few project bonus shots - just for posterity:

I really hated this 2-rail look:

So I took it apart and started over: