With the base finished, the next step in Rosedale landscaping was gluing down the patio. I don’t attach my houses to the base permanently, but I do glue down the landscaping elements, so I had to measure carefully and make sure the patio was properly centered.
When I first pulled out these flagstones, I intended to create a rectangular courtyard in front of the house. My dad and I spent a long time playing around with the various pieces (15 sets of a square, a long rectangle, and a short rectangle) to try to come up with a good pattern. Here were some of the contenders.
Initially I really liked the idea of using all the pieces, with a walkway on the left and a patio area on the right, but also needed to figure out what to do with the topiary planters. I was going to place one one each side of the walkway but my dad thought it was weird to have one topiary on the patio and one in the grass.
He suggested keeping the walkway on the left and using fewer flagstones on the right to make a smaller patio area on the right, so the topiaries would be on the grass, just behind the fence posts, on either side. I resisted it at first but after playing around a bit more I decided he was right. The benefit of this is that we now had more flagstones to play with, and came up with cleaner patterns for both the walkway and the patio.