Update

For those of you who were wondering, we are continuing to slave over the patio project. We spent yet another long hot weekend working our tails off on it last weekend. The largest part of which was dealing with the gravel. We had finished digging the depth last week and bought the first yard of gravel. According to the magic book our finished gravel depth needed to be 4 inches. I don't know what I expected, but by the end of the weekend it took 5 and a half yards of gravel (which is 11 trips... wait, is that right?? holy cow) to the local (thank goodness) D & B store which is about a minute and a half from our house. Lemme tell you guys, at this point we have SO blown the budget, which was our stimulus check. We blew that in just the stone alone. I ordered the stones from Home Depot and was enormously grateful to see that they could deliver them directly to us. A blessing of the largest sort as we needed 4 pallets and each pallet weighs 2800 pounds... that alone would have made for at least 16 trips to Home Depot and that's a 20 minute drive one way! Yicks. So, the stone showed up last Friday night. We have yet to actually lay any of it but it'll be beautiful!
On Sunday we rented a plate compactor from Tates and compacted the gravel. Nacho had to exert his authority over the compactor and chased it around gnawing on it's edges and barking, much the way he does every time we vacuum. He's very tough. So at this point we have our set-up mostly complete, the problems hopefully problem-solved and have only to screed an inch thick layer of sand and lay our stones. Voila! Just like that it'll be done... psh, just like that.
The Supervisors, very helpful.
The aftermath...
840 Rustic Tumbled Cobblestone $1300
5+ yards of gravel $187
55 feet of edging and stakes $100
26 Retaining wall bricks $39
? Yards of sand for screeding $?

50 + Hours of hard, sweaty labor and having a patio we can entertain on... Priceless