Hi, Thank you for all your posts. It is so helpful and I am grateful you have taken the time from your day. I will try address some of the questions. I will have to do the water drainage test as suggested by SC77. My intuition is that it drains okay. The soil has a heavy clay component but is brown and rich. I do not feel it is hydrophobic as the ground stays wet for a long time. However, I am more than happy to be wrong. The grass is not happy at all and is filled with moss and weeds. For the pictures, it was really pouring at that time and I thought it gave a good illustration of my concerns. Water is flowing across my yard from left to right and exiting into my neighbor's yard at the far right. The downspout you see in the picture would be very difficult to reroute. I have two others at the left side of the picture that you cannot see that would be better candidates. The front of my home has the yard sloping gently towards the road. I could bury a pipe and redirect the two downspouts that are currently contributing to the pool on the far left of the picture towards the road. The is no storm drain per se, just the gutter of the road which lesds towards a drain farther down off my property. In the meantime, I might get a 10' pipe and extend the downspout you do see further from the house. I would hope it might allow that 10' to be drier closer to the house. So, my Spring project is a DIY grading mostly to fill in local impressions & reroute some of the downspouts. I will also test my soil to see the absorption rate and treat with surfactants if needed. Then, when we replace our current patio in a few years, we will readjust with the help of a professional. I would go the professional route faster but we are first time homeowners with quite a laundry list of improvements and limited means. Have I missed anything?

Ok, so the old pad and the tree are fixed. I'm afraid I don't see the impediment to removing the old flagstone, however. It doesn't look all that firmly concreted it. Once you remove it, or even before you do, clear it from your brain. Don't factor it into your plans any more than you would factor in a piece of old linoleum into plans indoors. You may find that getting out there and starting to remove the yew trunks will help you mentally move past them as well. Your situation of not wanting to do much demolition is going to limit your ability to improve the area, so I would keep your installations very simple, minimal in fact, and easily reversible. The next owners of your home, or possibly you if you stay longer than you think, will eventually want to address the area as a whole, so do them a favour and yourself a favour by not making it too complicated. In addition, whatever you do is not going to be long-lasting in the conditions you have, so don't overwhelm yourself. Skip the planters and defining the area, and don't make a bunch of different areas or types of surface. You just need open space that you can enjoy that is easy to take care of. I would suggest you cover the whole unpaved area with cheap concrete slabs available at your average big box store for quite a reasonable price. Again, watch craigslist too - you never know. Watch the free and garden/materials listings. My preference is for 24x24, or 18x18, because the fewer cracks you have, the easier they are to maintain. However, those sizes are harder to handle and level than, say, 12x12. You don't give your zone, but I don't think you should do a bunch of base installation anyway - I would just put the slabs on the dirt and if you have frost heave, so be it; you can do a bit of relevelling. I say this because between tree roots and the fact that the pad will eventually be demolished by someone, there is no point in building a stellar patio that is going to be changed anyway in not too many years. There's a trick here too: you can cover the pad as well with those slabs, if you design the grade so it is just at the right height. Now, just a tip about "my husband loves the tree and the slab..." We used to have a couple of huge willow trees in the back yard that I wanted to remove. I am the gardener, and they were causing endless backbreaking work for me (long story). My husband rarely goes in the yard but looks at it out the back window all the time. "But I love those trees" he would say, from inside, while I griped about yet another day spent pruning and dealing with their litter and other constraints. It took me a while to wise up, but finally one year I enlisted him to do the pruning (they overhung the garbage area of the lane and that had to be kept clear). The trees were down within 6 months :-) Moral of the story, if he loves them, make them his headache. Why should you be sweeping and worrying about edging the concrete pad if he loves it? Let it get covered with debris and eventually disappear into the soil. He'll figure it out. Karin L

Active dogs and a lush, healthy lawn are incompatible :-) If you wish to have a decent lawn immediately surrounding your patio area, then you must keep the dogs off of it. You could designate a dedicated (and fenced) play area for the dogs elsewhere that is surfaced in wood chips that will resist mud and destruction. Unless you need an enlarged patio, I would not recommend increasing the size or adding on to the existing one. You could also treat the disturbed area next to the patio with wood chips as well, but the aesthetics of that solution leave much to be desired.

A grass patio isn't fun to use when it's wet, you have to move furniture to mow (as stated above), and god help you if you have a fidgeter (I would have a bare spot under my seat in about three hours). Of all the gravels I like the look of pea gravel the best. If you do an inch or so of pea gravel over a compacted base of 21a/ABC/crusher run, it's very solid and walkable, but it's still a rounded stone. The more use the patio sees, the more it'll migrate. As Yard mentioned above, an angular stone stays put better. Here we used #8 chip gravel at a VERY busy winery (lots of foot traffic) and there's very little migration into the beds or lawn areas. In your circumstance, I'd build the patio on a base of 6 inches compacted crusher run, then an inch of your decorative aggregate. An advantage of this is that down the road if budget allows, the decorative aggregate and a little of the crusher run can be scraped off and the patio converted to dry-laid flagstone. That's how we did our patio, because our 100 year old home still needs a new kitchen and a new downstairs bathroom and a new boiler and... yeah don't buy old homes unless you're independently wealthy. Anyhow that's my .02