DIY disaster??

(This is not our patio...this picture was taken from here.)
Have you ever seen that show Disaster DIY?? The next show airing is Backyard Blues. How fitting, hey Greg??
We worked like dogs today on our back patio. In fact we've been working on it slowly all week. We don't really know what we're doing. We go off a few key clues given to us by our handyman expert "Luke". Then we totally screw everything up 10 times and then finally get it sorta ok and go again.
We're really trying our hardest not to be the people that build the brick patio that looks like it has been through an earthquake. We are surrounded by family that is far more skilled in this sort of thing, and we could potentially be the laughing stock of all.
The hardest part was that we started the project thinking we were doing one thing, and later realizing that in fact it should be done another way. So, we had to shovel dirt out of the hole, more than half of what we had just put into it. LONG story short...I won't bore you. We managed to level it as best we could (keeping in mind that our remaining sidewalk is not level, so we can't match it to that). We removed a million boulders and called them bad names. And we tampered it down and spread a good inch of sand on top. Hopefully tomorrow we will be set to start laying down the bricks. We are reusing the bricks from our yard that are now in a pathway. We have no idea if we have enough bricks to cover this area! I guess it'll be a wait-see thing...it could end up being a much smaller patio!
Please wish us luck that we don't screw this up, as this has been a major project and has taken hours out of our lives while our children are wreaking havoc inside our house in the meantime. Tomorrow I intend to use child-labor to bring the bricks over one at a time! And then I will post pictures and jump up and down and do a happy dance all over our very level and BEAUTIFUL new brick patio. Cuz Greg and I rock at this kind of thing.