My engineer hubby has done it again; he built us a patio in our backyard. What a manly man he is.
Let me tell ya, laying bricks/pavers is no fun. I don't ever want to lay another brick in my life and neither does my hubby. Especially my hubby. He did a whole lot more than me.
We had a truck deliver and load of sand. We also had a load of filler rock delivered earlier.
We used a lot of landscape adhesive (it looks just like caulk so you need a caulk gun) to hold each paver together along with some...
geogrid. We just used some plastic fencing from Lowes that looks just the same.
Here is an example of what the process is. You have two "wall" pavers, and sandwiched between them is some geogrid and landscape adhesive. It makes for a very stable foundation. The geogrid extends into the center of the patio and you shovel dirt on top of it to weigh it down.
This is us in the process of filling up the hole with filler gravel. Hubby built the side walls first so he knew how high to fill in with gravel. Fill compaction is critical, don't ever let yourself become lazy when it comes to compaction because it will save you a lot of headache in the future. We want a solid patio not a wobbly, unsettled one. Sandwich the geogrid between wall pavers, put a bunch of dirt (the height of a paver) on top of the extended geogrid, compact it, and do another layer building your wall up.
In the above picture you can see some pink string stretched across the wall. That's how we made sure the wall was straight from one corner to another. If you want a good looking wall, everything has to be straight, square, level (horizontal), and plumb (vertical). This means a lot of checking and rechecking measurements. Have a level on hand.
Once the dirt was all level we shoveled sand on top of the dirt and then laid down the top pavers. Man it's hard to get everything level. We poured more sand on top of the pavers and brushed over them with a broom to fill in the small gaps between each paver.
We had to rent a wet saw to cut some pavers down so they would fit in some tricky spots like around the deck pillars and at each corner. Wear ear plugs unless you want your ears to ring for a couple days. No fun.
And thats it. Looks easier to do than it is but it's doable. We figured we saved about $500-$600 by doing it ourselves rather than hiring it out.
Stephanie
