We have added more images to the album to show what we’ve done since the last post.

Since we put a drain in our patio, we needed to give the water a place to go.  We dug a trench to the front yard.  This was a lot harder than we expected.  Our front yard has about 2 inches of grass and dirt on top of packed gravel.  This is great for drainage, but horrible to dig a trench through.  We used corrugated drain pipe wrapped in a special sock.  We nested the corrugated pipe in a ridged PVC pipe where it runs under our sidewalk.  All of this was wrapped in black landscaping fabric and then buried.

After the trench was filled in, we used more paving stones to replace the section of sidewalk we had removed.

Here’s a picture of us sweeping polymeric sand between the pavers.  Most people don’t remember ANY rain over Labor Day weekend.  Marie and I remember quite well that it sprinkled for about 10 minutes… BEFORE we were done sweeping in this “water activated” sticky sand.  It turned out fine, but we were a bit rushed towards the end.

We used our old pavers behind our garage.  We didn’t prepare a base for these pavers since nobody will really ever see them.   I just didn’t want to mow any more weeds back here.

We also had to create steps on the deck and finish the steps by the back door.  We still plan to add cladding to the sides of the steps on the deck.

The grass we seeded is coming along nicely.  It has been very dry here.  The rest of the yard seems to have already gone dormant for the winter.  Our new grass looks very green in comparison.

We decided that our pile of busted up concrete was too large to use the “Shawshank” method of concrete disposal.  We are using a dumpster bag.  These bags hold 3 cubic yards of waste or 3300 pounds.  You’re only supposed to put 1 cubic yard of concrete in them.  Let’s hope this is only 1 cubic yard.

Marie and I have entered the next phase in our slow moving landscaping project.   Here’s what has happened since we last posted.

First, we grossly underestimated the amount of class 5 crushed gravel we needed.  For the first load we ordered 2 and 1/2 cubic yards.

Several weeks later, we got our second load.  It came out about perfect at 1 and 2/3 cubic yards.  Unfortunately the delivery costs almost as much as the gravel.

Each time we spread the gravel, we also needed to compact it.  We have rented this little vibrating plate compactor twice.  We will rent it again before we’re done.

The amount of gravel was important to us because we wanted to match the height of an existing slab of concrete.  Also, we had an interesting drainage problem we are trying to solve.  We decided that under no circumstances would we slope the patio towards the house, so we sloped it towards the garage and put a channel drain between the patio and an existing slab of concrete next to the garage.

Although this channel drain is made to be used in concrete, we were told that it has been successfully used with patio pavers in low traffic installations.  We’ll see how it works for us.  The green color is just masking tape we have over the grates to keep the sand out of it while we’re working.  Also, we will be putting a concrete mortar or patch material between the drain and the existing slab of concrete before we’re done with this project.  The other side is staked in place.

We buried a rigid PVC pipe under the pavers in front of our steps.  The plan is to hook it to a slotted corrugated drain pipe and trench it into the front yard.  We’re hoping that it will act as it’s own drain field and not require us to pop the pipe up to daylight in the front yard.  To do this we will need to remove a section of sidewalk.  We expect the sidewalk will break and we’ll have to use more pavers in it’s place.

One of the things we’re also working on is our steps.  There was a bad patch job on the corner of our back steps.  Three gentle taps with a hammer and the corner crumbled to pieces.  We’re lucky nobody has been hurt on this.  We are in the process of layering vinyl cement patch over this bad corner.  What we have put in place so far is very solid, but we still need to square it off with the rest of the step.

We also painted the front step with some concrete paint we found in our basement.

This last weekend things started getting fun.  We set screed rails on top of marker stakes we set in our packed gravel.  Our rails were 3/4 inch galvanized pipe.  The outside diameter of these are very close to 1 inch.  Then we tossed our old sand on top of our gravel and screeded a nice even bed to lay our bricks on.

Cue the Tetris music.

We think that setting bricks in a random layout is probably harder to do than using a pattern.  We were following two rules.  The first rule is to avoid making swastikas.  The second rule is to avoid any lines in the pattern (between the bricks) longer than a yard.  Those rules are easy to understand.  What we wish someone had explained to us is that it is very possible to get into a situation due to edge constraints where you either have to rip out half of your pavers, or cut one of them in half.  We’re still trying to figure out what happened, but we were chasing a problem that (if we had continued) would have caused us to run a chain of little bricks from one edge of the patio to an adjacent edge.

So, that brings us to the current state of the project.  We have laid most of the bricks.  We still have a handful that we need to cut and put into place.  I also want to rework a couple areas before locking them into place.  Here’s how it looks so far though.

The next steps are…

• Finish cutting and adjusting the bricks.
• Finish putting the edging in place.
• Remove a section of sidewalk.
• Dig a trench to the front yard for the drain pipe.
• Fill trench and replace section of sidewalk.
• Sweep polymeric sand between the bricks.
• Use a vibrating plate compactor to set the bricks and sand into place.
• Fill in the soil along the patio edges and plant grass.
• Stain the fence and gate before putting it back up.
• Put mortar between the drain and the concrete.
• Complete the concrete patch job on the steps.
• Paint steps.

<sigh>  That’s still a lot of work.