Backyard Patio - Done!

The title says it all.   It's been a while since the first patio post and it's been a while since the patio was finished as well.  Lazy me just hasn't posted about it.  My goal was to finish the project in 13 days as a play on the first post's title.  We didn't make it in 13 consecutive days but I think it took about 13 different days to finish.  I'm not sure because I took pictures throughout to detail the progress but for some reason forgot to take pictures during the final days.

Previously I said that we rented a plate compactor and had some ABC stone delivered.  We shoveled and wheeled  all of it from the driveway to the patio site.  It was heavy and tiring but we finished it...only to find out that we didn't have enough!  By this time it was Sunday and the place that we bought the stone from is closed on Sundays so we took a chance and called them only to get their answering machine.  Fortunately they are a family run business and they returned our call several hours later.  I drove over and picked up some more stone, we moved it to the back yard and finished this job.

After getting the base finished we brought in the sand, screeded it using PVC pipe and laid the pavers.  This was probably the fastest and visually the most rewarding part of the process.  Only one side was curved so we started opposite of that side and worked that way.  In order to save some cutting we moved the wall on the short edge in about 1" when we discovered there was a gap.

We borrowed a wet saw and an angle grinder from a friend to cut the pavers to fill in the gaps at the curved edge.  Once that was done we filled in the gaps between the pavers about half way up with some extra sand and then filled in the rest with polymeric sand.  We wet it a few times to set the sand and the surface was done!

The last part to do was to fill in behind the small retaining wall.  We bought several bags of drainage rock and filled in several inches deep behind the wall.  We used fill dirt left over from the initial excavation to fill in the rest.  After filling in behind the wall we ordered 10 yards of cypress chips to spread over the play area.

After moving the furniture onto the patio it was done!  Final cost was under $2500.

There is still more work to do such as getting grass to grow where we killed it while building the patio and possibly adding some benches however those will have to just get added to ever growing list of things to do.  For now we'll enjoy the patio.

Backyard Patio - 13 Years in the (Decision) Making

A while back I hinted on Facebook that we were thinking of building a patio.  In reality we've been thinking of building a patio for the past 13 years (time really does fly).  Last year we had a screened porch built (by JStar Construction Inc. - give them a call!).  After looking at the dismal state of our grass next to our nice screened porch we decided to act.  The 20% off sale at Lowes helped too. 

So the first order of business was to put the kids to work. They worked really hard and did a fine job...for the 5-10 minutes that they "helped".

Over a couple of weeks the area for the deck was excavated to a depth of 7" (4" for gravel base, 1" for sand and 2" for the pavers).

We also picked out the pavers and decided to go with a design they call "K pattern".

This coming weekend will be the fun part.  On Friday we are renting a plate compactor and having 5 cubic yards of ABC stone (crush and run) delivered.  We'll use the plate compactor on the clay on either Friday night or Saturday morning and then spend all day Sunday hauling gravel to the patio area.  Since we can't have them dump the gravel near the patio area we'll have to haul it there using a wheel barrow.  Once it's all spread and leveled we'll use the plate compactor again on it.

Assuming we survive the weekend, sometime in the next few weeks we'll have sand delivered, build retaining walls on some edges and lay the pavers.

To be continued...