Got home from work tonight and got busy on the patio. It doesn’t seem like much from the pictures, but here’s what I did:

• Dug out the two rows of stones on the south side of the patio.
• Dug a trench about 6″ below the current level of the ground. In this trench I placed particularly clean and flat stones from the two rows dug up earlier.
• Laid one row of retaining wall block on the stones in the trench, using block adhesive to make sure it won’t go anywhere.
• Cut the landscaping cloth and placed it on the newly laid south wall, to keep the dirt there and let the water flow through.
• Back filled the newly laid wall, then filled in the V-shaped gaps between the blocks with rock. Saturday I’ll fill in the gaps with mortar - won’t use as much by filling them with rock first!
• Back filled the second row on the west wall, now that I had more dirt from the trench. Also filled in the gaps with rock to be filled in later with mortar.

Next time I can work on this is Saturday, so I hope it isn’t raining then. Here are the pictures of the progress. Sorry for the poor quality on these. We have had one of the hottest days of the summer (we actually turned on our air conditioner for only the second time this summer) and it is extremely humid with all the rain we’ve had. That caused the camera lens to fog up and you get pix like these.