snowball effect

yesterday we learned a lesson of homeownership: the snowball effect.  you know, like when you plan to change a lightbulb, but in the end changing that lightbulb leads to remodeling your entire living room?

there is (well, was) a deck on the back of our house. 

we've planned to take it down since we moved in last fall.  a lot of the wood was rotten, and the loose railings and open stairs made it very unsafe for william.  so we thought that we could just take off the deck and use the cement slab underneath as a patio until we could afford to take up the cement and lay a nice brick patio.

well, apparently we were a bit naive because now in our backyard we have this:

the cement blocks that were holding up the deck are attached to the cement slab.  so now we have to either use those blocks as our patio chairs, or we have to rent a jackhammer to rip up the whole thing and lay a new patio (sigh).

on a more positive note, william had a blast playing on the new-to-us slide that i bought for him at a garage sale last week!

we hope you all are enjoying this beautiful weather!  we sure are!

update:
saved by the sledgehammer!  our neighbor came over with one and he and aaron were able to ust it to knock off the cement blocks, so we are back to our original plan!