Time for a New Patio

I realized today that it has been quite a while since my last update but a lot has changed.  Back at the end of May I left my job working in student housing to move into a position with multi-family apartments.  I really decided that after 11 years in student housing it was just time to stop taking care of everyone else’s kids and I wanted to have a little less stressful job.  This career change gave me about five weeks to work on my house before my next job started which was great since I was working 65 hour weeks at my old job and was not getting much progress done on my house.  One of the big tasks was the retaining wall shown in a previous post, but I have also worked on installing a new window in the kitchen, re-landscaped the back yard, and added new sod to the back yard.  The biggest project has been the installation of the back patio which I will write about it in this post. 

First off, a little history of the back patio.  When I purchased the house there was a wood deck that was about six inches off the ground and was starting to get in bad shape.  My brother pulled it up last summer and we threw it out with our neighborhood dumpster day.  Under that deck was the original concrete patio and there was literally six inches of dog and cat hair on top of the concrete up to the wood deck.  A large tree was next to the patio and it caused the original concrete patio to buckle; which is probably why there was the wood deck on top of it.  Unfortunately it looks like I do not have any pictures of this so you will just have to take my word for it.  I do have this picture of the backyard with the old timbers and you can see the pavers that were used to extend the patio.  I sold these all on craigslist since my plan includes no pink pavers anywhere in my yard. 

Here is a picture of the tree that caused the patio to heave.  It was removed with the other old trees in the back yard and you can see a little of the old patio.  

A couple months ago my dad had a couple guys available at his office so he sent them up to my house and they removed the concrete.  It took almost two days with a jack hammer because of how thick the concrete was.  We found out that for some reason the back patio was poured with a footer as if it was to be used for the floor in the extension of the house.  This made the concrete almost 14 inches deep in spots.  Below are a couple pictures of the concrete being removed. 

The guys that removed the concrete had to temporarily brace up the patio cover because there was concrete under the posts.  I then decided I wanted to move the posts on the patio cover further out to make a bigger patio.  This involved adding brand new posts.  I had to dig down over 24 inches to get below the frost line and then poured concrete into the holes for the new posts.  I then re-built the header and added extra wood to make it a little stronger.

After the roof of the patio was re-built, it was time for the new patio.  This required adding dirt to the areas where the footer originally was and then removing some dirt from the high places.  The next step was bringing in a little over 4,000 pounds of road base (which is a mix of small rock and rock dust) to put down a four inch layer across the area where the patio would be.  My brother and I then used a gas powered compactor to compress the road base to make it level.  This will help with all the heaving of the soil that can occur from the thaw/freeze cycles that we see in Colorado. 

The next step was to add a sand layer on top of the road base to lay the pavers on top of.  I chose a 16” x16” square paver to give more of a contemporary look and also because you do not see it everywhere.  The drawback was that there was over 170 pavers needed for the project and they are quite heavy when they get that big.  We used metal conduit laid on top of the road base to use as a guide for the thickness of our sand which you can see in the below pictures.  You can also see in the pictures a string along the outside edge that I used to make sure everything was square as we laid the patio. 

I then needed to compact the pavers with a gas powered compactor to set the pavers firmly in the sand.  To keep from breaking the pavers, I rolled out old carpet with the soft side down and ran the compactor over the backing of the carpet.  It worked great and kept the pavers from chipping or cracking.  I also added a small grilling area off to the side.  This will eventually have outdoor cabinets built around the grill to make an outdoor kitchen.  Lastly I added some very fine sand to fill in some of the small cracks between the pavers.  You will always have some small gaps between pavers since they will not be perfectly square.  Also over time the pavers will settle and you will have to keep adding sand.  I did have to buy a paver saw from Harbor Freight to make the cuts for the rounded part of the patio and for the edges but they are fairly inexpensive.  You can rent one but for as much as I will use it, it was cheaper to buy one.  Below is the final outcome of the patio.  It turned out great and made a huge impact on the back yard. 

Here is a picture with my new patio furniture.  The couches are for another patio I will be building here soon on the side of my house, but they work fine here for now.

I still need to build a step coming out of the house and do some painting/trim work but that is about it.  Since these pictures were taken, I have added LED can lights to the ceiling of the patio and will also be adding outdoor speakers and then covering the ceiling in exterior plywood to make it seem more like an outdoor living room.  I will add pictures to the blog when that is all done.   Well that is about all for now.  I will do another blog post here shortly on some of the other projects I recently completed so keep a close eye on the blog.  Until next time….. 

PS According to HomeDepot.com, I have made 106 purchases with my credit card at their stores since I moved into my house one year ago.  Since I occasionally pay by cash or gift card I can say I have been there well over 120 times.  I am pretty sure I am there more often than the grocery store which is probably why a lot of the people at Home Depot know my name. :)