Backyard Improvements

 Last year my mom wanted to do some improvements on her back yard.  One thing she really wanted was to have a paved path from the patio to the back fence.  There is a gate in the back fence that leads to a field.  The field is low lands used by the farmer that live behind them as drainage for his fields.  Sometimes, about every 3 or 5 years, he grows mint out there, but normally it's just grass that he rolls into hay bales and sells.  He doesn't mind at all that several people in the neighborhood use the land for walking their dogs and jogging.  So when a windstorm took out the old fence and my parents had to rebuild, they arranged to have a gate installed that would lead them directly into the field where they walk the dogs every day.

The gate is located in the middle of the fence line, directly at the end of the deck.  Since my mom has a beautiful and plentiful flower garden along the deck, it makes a lovely path for the walk to the gate.  And since the dogs and my parents walk to the gate every day for their walk, a little path is just what was formed... a little dirt path.  My mom wasn't happy about that at all and she resolved to make a path out of Paving Stone.  She hunted around for which kind to use.  Once, on TV, I had seen some that were just a mold for cement.  You just use them almost cookie cutter like.  They were big pieces of mold that made the path look like it was cut into several smaller pieces.  I thought it was really cool because it was so easy.  You don't have to figure out how to arrange the stones, you just cookie cutter them out.  The problem was that they were all exactly the same and it didn't look natural.

My argument was, who cares?? Some people use Patio Pavers to make entire patios and those don't look natural, but they do look beautiful.  Mom wanted something the looked at least a little natural.  We shopped for a couple of days and one day we found exactly what we wanted.  Some absolutely beautiful paving stones at Lowe's mispriced.  I snapped a photo with my phone and we asked management if they wouldn't mind selling the product at the incorrect price.  My mom said she felt like it was dishonest, or at least unkind, to try to weasel savings out of an honest mistake.  I told her we could just ask, and they would almost certainly feel obligated to say yes, and then we wouldn't be the people who tried to cheat them.

Mom asked for the department manager.  She explained that she knew the item was mislabled and that the price was incorrect.  Then she asked if he wouldn't mind selling it for the incorrect price since that was how it was marked.  He didn't want to say yes, you could tell.  He said that the price was very, very off and it was beyond his ability to approve such a big discount.  He had to call the general manager, who quickly approved the price drop and told them how to apply the discount at the register.  I thought it was a tactful way to go about it.  In the end, mom got enough paving stones to make two paths, not just one.  And they are still here today a year later, making a perfect path to the back and side gates.