Working with Bozz: More Home Improvements

If you are a homeowner, you know that it is a never ending process. There is always something that needs to be fixed, a lawn that needs to be mowed, a driveway to be shoveled.

Many of the smaller things we tend to leave until the become bigger problems because let's be honest, life is busy and a lot of times we just don't have time for the small stuff.

I fully intended to write a post participating in @slobberchops Five from the Seventies challenge today.

Like I said though, life gets busy and instead I am going to share what I have been working on the past week. In an older post, I wrote about how my wife and I had gotten a new deck installed.

The post was really only about two months ago, but that is an eternity in Steemit time!

After we had the old deck torn out and the new one installed there were some leftover patio pavers that I thought might be cool to move near the stairs of the new deck. I did some measuring, and it turned out I had exactly enough pavers to cover the area that I wanted.

Figuring karma was trying to tell me something I set to work getting the area ready. As you can see in the opening picture, I marked out the area, removed the topsoil, and laid out the pavers to see how they would look.

Last weekend I took advantage of the beautiful weather we had and I dug out the rest of the area. I knew I had to go down about 7 inches so I could add 4 inches of gravel and then 1 to 2 inches of sand on top of that.

I have done patios like this before and this time I wanted to make sure I had the best base possible to lay the stones down. After work one day this week, I ran to the landscape store and had them dump a half ton of gravel in the back of my truck for about $17.00 USD.

I thought it was going to be a much bigger job, but it only took me about forty five minutes to move the gravel from the back of my truck to the area where the pavers were going via wheelbarrow.

This was after dumping the first load. Like I said, I had it all moved in no time and eventually it looked like this.

The next day I ran back to the landscape store and I got some of the sand that I would need to put on top of the gravel. I ended up getting about one quarter of a ton for $6.50 USD. That's pretty awesome when you think of it because we already had the stones so besides the back breaking work, I did the whole project for less than $25.00 USD

I used a weighted tamper that I borrowed from my father in law and compacted the gravel to make sure it was all settled in to a good base. Then I laid down my PVC pipes I had purchased to be a guide for how deep I needed the sand to me. This also gives you a good guide to get the sand all level and ready for the stones.

Once that was ready, I started hauling the sand back and forth from the truck to the work area. It didn't take that long to move it and I was soon ready to start laying down paver blocks.

I removed the PVC pipe and filled in the trenches that were left behind, then I started laying each block starting at the bottom of the picture and working my way out.

It took longer than I had planned to lay the blocks and there was still some leveling I had to do on each block. It wasn't too bad though since there were only 18 blocks total. If there had been more I probably would have needed help.

I had been working for about an hour and a half by the time I got to this point and I figured it was probably about as good as it was going to get. I moved the rest of the sand from the back of the truck and went to work filling in the cracks so that the blocks could set into place.

In hindsight, I think I either dug the hole to deep or I should have put some more gravel down. The stones look nice, but they aren't quite as high as I would have liked them to be. There is a cement slab at the bottom of the picture and they are just a little lower than the height of that. Ideally they would have been flush with the slab.

You can see what I am talking about better in this picture. Overall, I am pretty happy with it though and I think it turned out really nice. The real test will be this Winter when the ground starts to heave. How much the blocks move will tell me how good of a job I did building up the base underneath for them.

Thanks for stopping in! I plan on tackling some mechanic work with my buddy this weekend on my truck, so keep an eye out for that post next week!