Click here to see the iCloud photo gallery of the patio build (gallery will open in a new page).

How hard can it be? A phrase I'm prone to using. And in the case of a new patio, I can tell you... How hard is it? Really really REALLY bloody hard. Patios look easy. They ain't!

Grass won't grow in the garden. It's just too wet. Water from the field behind the house seeps down, which means the ground is constantly wet. So not long after moving in 2006, we covered the entire garden with decking.

Decking is excellent but doesn't last, especially if you never treat it. So roll on 15 years, and the old deck is not only an eye sore but also getting dangerous, not to mention the rodents that make a home under it in the winter months.

Time to rip it up and pave the whole area.

We'd decided to split the job into three lots. The main bit is under a canopy, the big one in the middle and the lower one by the garage. If it was going to be expensive, we could get it done one section at a time. We budgeted £3k for the lot.

So we got some eye-watering quotes, even for just the basics. Getting the first bit done was more than we'd expected for the lot. And that was without any additional drainage we later realised we'd need.

One quote to do the whole thing was nearly double our budget, excluding materials!

It was lockdown, and we had plenty of time on our hands, so I said...

Hey, how hard can it be? Let's do it ourselves!

The answer to that, I can now tell you, is hard, really hard. Backbreaking, brain-melting, soul-destroyingly hard.

But we did it! It took us four months, with some big breaks in the middle of it as we hit a wall and couldn't figure out a way around it. But by god, we got it finished. Almost as good as any pro could do it (I think), with lots of extras and a huge amount of drainage.

Some stats...

• 10 tonnes of soil and clay dug out by hand and wheelbarrowed to a skip.

• 8 tonnes of blinding and stone deposited in the garden by hand.

• 300 paving slabs laid. By one person. Me.

• An awful lot of additional drainage was put in to deal with an insane amount of rainfall.