We’ve been gearing up to start and finish our paver patio this weekend….it took a while to get mentally prepared for all the work that would be involved.  But alas, here we are.

Almost every night this week we spent time setting the grade for the gravel base, ensuring proper sloping for drainage and making sure it’s level- no dips or gaps or peaks or valleys.

The goal for Friday night- to rent a gravel compactor and get the base compacted as tight as possible.  Saturday morning we would pick up sand and start spreading it and laying pavers.

Well, the gravel compacting went so quickly that we were standing there at 6:00 with nothing to do….so we dumped the leftover sand we had (from the circle patio project) down and started our screeding process:

Well that got me all antsy and I couldn’t wait- so I started laying pavers! 

Trevor had a friend over, so we utilized the available muscles and had the boys moving pavers from the stacks over to me so I could set them.  These were stacks we made when we pulled up the paths from the old circle patio. 

So the back patio went from this:

to this:

All those pavers installed in about one hour- maybe a little less!

Bummer that all the sand suppliers were closed for the day, we were at a standstill by 8:00 with nothing left to do until the suppliers open in the morning.  No sand = no screeding = no laying pavers. 

We moved the rest of the pavers closer to the patio project so we could take a full inventory on what we have left on hand….and calculate what we still need to do and figure out what the shortage will be.  We’ve calculated that we need 96 more squares and 173 more rectangles, plus another yard of sand and probably some edging and spikes.

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Saturday…we got a fairly early start- about 8:30am.  Jim had to pick up a load of sand and he quickly moved it into the backyard where I did the screeding.  When I was almost out of pavers he went to Best Buy Landscape to pick up more.   I called them first thing in the morning to place an order- so they could load it onto a pallet and it would be ready for us.  Trevor and his friend helped to unload the truck.

We were completely done with laying pavers before 3:00.  A couple areas required re-work…trying to get the path to connect was a little challenging, and the spacing where the patio and path come together needed to be adjusted a bit.  I’d guess maybe an hour was spent on re-work or trying to figure out the best way to connect the two.

We rented a paver saw and made all the little cuts and got the whole thing completed by 5:30!

Yippee!!

(A more detailed project page is on our other blog)