Paver Stones

I've been trying to lay a few paver stones in the back yard to extend the small concrete pad behind the house. Unfortunately, this slightly reduces the size of the future garden, but its a sacrifice that needs to be made. The stones I used were from a stack that the previous owners had kindly left us for no apparent reason. Now, I don't know that these are technically "paver" stones. More like brick and/or concrete tiles. They're about 1.5" thick and varying sizes. I laid out some stones preliminarily in the pattern I wanted. This is what it looked like at first.

For a few of the pieces, I had to break them to the desired size. For that, I just smacked them on the edge of the concrete pad. It worked pretty well. The break lines aren't perfectly straight, but its good enough. Next I moved the stones out of the way and dug down so about three inches below the level of the concrete pad. Check out how nice that dirt looks!!

I had purchased a 0.5 cubic foot bag of pebbles, and another 0.5 cubic foot bag of coarse sand. The area I'm doing is about 6ft by 18 inches, so that should be about 2/3in thick layer of each of those things. These materials are specifically for laying pavers and it suggests a 1" thick layer of each, so I figured I'd be fine. Here is what it looks like after putting down the first layer and walking around on it to compact it a bit.

Next comes the sand stuff. Again, I walked around on this to firmly compact it. I then put one of the stones down on the sand to check the level.

Its hard to see from the picture but the top of the stone is a good 1" or more below the level of the concrete pad. Whoops. Not only did I dig up too much dirt, but when I compacted the stone and sand it seemed to just sink right into the dirt and take up no space.

So lets fast-forward 6 days later. I bought two more bags of pebbles and another bag of sand. First, though I put much of the dirt that I had dug up back over the first couple layers. Then I stomped around on it a while to compact it.

I then put one and half bags of the pebbles down on the dirt, compacted that and then put about 2/3 of the bag of sand on that and compacted it again. If you're wondering why the color of the sand is different, I bought it from a different home improvement store. Same basic thing, though.

Finally, time to put the stones back on and check the level.

Ugh. Apparently I need to do some leveling and stabilizing. That took a surprising amount of time, the rest of the pebbles, most of the rest of the sand, and all the remaining dirt I had left. I did reserve a small amount of the sand to put in a couple of the bigger gaps between stones. Here is the finished product.

I might be a bit biased, but it looks pretty good to me!! If you're wondering why I'm doing this in the first place, there is a reason, but you're just going to have to wait for a future post to find out. Oooh, suspense!

And just to make this a bit more garden related, I'll throw in a gratuitous closeup of the cover crops. That grass sure does look happy!