Finally ready to show a photo of the patio in its very-nearly-finished
The grass around the edges is growing in quite nicely, as you can see compared to my last shot from a few weeks ago. All the pavers are gone (a friend of my wife gladly came and took them all), and the overgrown planter they were sitting in has been re-shaped, planted with three boxwoods, and mulched. Around the edge of the patio we have put in those small solar-powered lights. Oh yeah, finally got the patio set, too!
Only big thing we're wanting to do back there is replace the flood light that you see on the back of my garage. We're thinking we want to remove the fixture and replace it with an outlet, actually. In the outlet we'd plug in some strings of outdoor lights, which we may try to hang from the back of the garage. For that I'm thinking of maybe installing some hooks, like you'd see holding a hanging basket on the side of one's house, so that the lights will sort of be 'over' the patio, and not just tacked up to the siding of the garage.