The Brew Cabin

Tony

As it is my "holiday" starting today the wife mentioned at the weekend instead of spending all day on the beach with the four year old how about a bit of paving for the little one to play on, as the rest of the garden is still a building site. (July 2000 gutted house to four walls and built an extension, not finished yet!)

So Saturday went to the local builders merchants (waste of five hours) prices no problem, knowledge of product or installation nil, Saturday night spent looking at Manufacturers web sites not much better!

Sunday afternoon search engines find your site quick look book marked it returned after childrens bed time 3:30am wife comes to find me what a brilliant site!

I have learnt so much in a short space of time, however now i realise i have several problems to contend with.

I will send you a number of photos via email and a quick paintbrush plan.

it is a fairly large area, i am thinking of a herringbone pattern down from the house, would a soldier course and one colour over a large area look to much?
(local supplier only does marshall charcoal and spotty red brindle pavers £15 m2)

We had to install a cess pit in the yard, the digger found what we call locally hoggin (red granite that has broken down to a material that will become a grit as you dig it out and break it up ) plus several large blue granite bolders 1 to 2 ton in size. When the pit was fitted and the drains laid etc. the hoggin was used as back file and spread over the whole site. With several ton of gravel over the top this has naturally compacted over the last 3 years. Please see close up photos, is this sufficient as a sub base you need a pick to break into it as a spade just jars your risk and shoulder as i found out this morning!

drainage problem the fixed point in the yard is the top of the cess pit, quick check this morning with laser cess pit concrete lid (not metal man hole cover, which will be replaced by clark paver cover) is 8 inches down from extension dpc by back door assuming 2 inch sand 2 inch
paver leaves only 4 inch down from dpc. Old house has no dpc, 3 foot stone walls, i fitted an electro osmosis system during the rebuild, as well as new floors dug down filled etc. to modern building control requirements and vandexed the lot up 3 foot on inside walls incorporating a wall floor joint, as damp was a major problem. You say a one in sixty drop from the property is this 1 inch in sixty?

in which case will i need to break the yard up into different levels, ie the cess pit area will be higher, so make a feature of it raised platform slope running to gardens and fit channel/ grating /drains around the raised platform to run of the water from the lower level away from the house.

last one what can you use as temporary soldier course, as i do not want to pave past the old barn (as this has yet to be rebuilt) say 3m strip which can then be removed and paved in to square off the area.


my head is starting to spin i think i better go lay down in a dark for a week and hope the wife forgets about this one, i would be so lucky

many thanks

gordonq

You have well in excess of 100m² of paving on this project....



...so you should be getting a much better price than 15 quid per square metre for standard blocks. Call around a few more BMs before agreeing to that price!

Further, using just one colour, in one pattern, over such a relatively large area is going to look bland. You need to think about how the area can be 'spiced-up' using contracting features, such as diamonds or circles, or by introducing contrasting paver types.

The gravel/hoggin that you have is just about acceptable as a sub-base, but I'd still prefer to regulate it with DTp1 or similar. There are likely to be problems with the levels, so I'd definitely be looking to use "genuine" sub-base material to help define these levels.

As for a temporary soldier/edge course, why not simply use a 'real' edge course and then break it out when the Old barn work is complete? There's no great cost or labour saving in using a 'temporary' edge course. If you skimp, it's likely to give way and then you face all the additional work of trying to repair the damaged paving, as well as the extension work.

I'm just about to order 300 sq metres of block paving ( a sort of brindle shade) of TopPave from jewson. This is to finish off hte drive following a 4 year self build. So I can negotiate ok prices at the local Jewson Branch. I'm being quoted <£7sqm for TopPave intersett. I'm also pying £9 per tonne of crushed concrete Type 1. If these prices are any help to you.

I take it that a brindle would nicely break up the areas okay?

Brindle as a colour doesn't break-up an area any more than any other multi-coloured block would. You need to use built-in patterns or designs to break-up larger areas, rather than rely on using a single colour shade.

Thanks, out of interest what sort of size of area is a "large" area and one which coule be done with one colour?