Hi everybody! Hope the holiday’s were good to you. We got a bit of work done on the back patio between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Rather than post a step by step tutorial, like I (kinda) did for the the front patio, I thought it’d be more fun to put up a video of part of the back patio going in.
I switched it up a bit for the back patio. Instead of renting a heavy duty gas powered plate compactor I used a good old hand powered hand tamper. The trade off of compacting by hand was well worth it. The patio space in the back is small and a plate compactor would be overkill.
Also, the video shows one patio going in. We actually put in a total of three patios by skipping the equipment rental we removed the pressure of trying to get all of the bases done in one day to minimize rental charges.
Aside from compacting the process is pretty much identical to what I described for the front patio. All in all, I think the total elapsed time in the video is about 4 hours of work condensed down to a minute and a half.
A word of advice to anyone considering installing a patio like this. Take your time placing your pavers. You probably won’t get everything perfectly level but you can get close if you don’t rush. If you find yourself getting impatient… stop. Be done for the day and come back to it later. Pavers are heavy and you don’t want to have to go back down the road and fix mistakes.
Still have a bit of hardscaping left (paths linking the patios) and a lot of landscaping. But that’s the fun part.
That’s turning out really great. Smart choice in materials. I love that stuff — even for driveways. I hope you can get at least some of your planting in while the block is cool this winter and we will have some rain to help the plants establish. this month’s Sunset has tips on winter planting — and some nice edible alternatives for gardens.
Dad
Looks awesome Eric!