We wanted our exterior surfaces to be as low maintenance as possible.  In the house I owned when Lisa and I met, there was about 1800 square feet of redwood deck.

Every year, I had to power wash, sand, and re-stain the deck to keep it looking nice.  It took several days to get it right, and it got old really fast.  I did that for over 10 years.

In this house, we didn’t want anything that would require any significant maintenance, so stone made a lot of sense.  We looked through a lot of stone before we settled on the blue stone, from India, we think.  The stone has colors that range from blue-greys to yellow and even a little rust color.  It is a nice match to the grey-green first story exterior color and the yellow-orange of the Santa Barbara sandstone.

We have four decks, on the second floor, the inside of our window-full sun room also on the second floor, our mud room entrance from the garage to the house, the front and back porches, two story outside stairs and landings, and possibly a fireplace hearth, that will be getting the stone.  Here is the first deck.

We chose a Versailles pattern, which you can see above.  It is a repeating pattern of different sized stones.  Here is a depiction:

That may not be exactly the same as our pattern, but reasonably similar; there are a number of variations of this pattern.

They floated all the decks already, so the stone should go on pretty quick.

Update 2/18/18

Here are some additional pictures.  The stone looks great!

We did a test of two different grouts, and chose the one on the right (grey).

The setters have done the 4 outside decks and one smaller patio, and are now working on the outside stairs.  After that, the front and back porch.