Posted: Fri Sep 25, 2009 10:11 pm
After a summer of toil during odd evenings and weekends I managed to (single handedly) complete my block paved patio/sideway last week. I couldn't have done it without the help of this site, so many thanks to all forum contributors and especially to Tony. Although I have made a few (minor I reckon) errors along the way, I am very happy with the way things have turned out.
Here's the project -
I don't really have any pics of the original patio, but you can see a bit of it here; the slabs weren't that bad, but they were laid badly on a very suspect base which in parts was no more than 1cm of brittle concrete on top of the soil.
I hired a breaker to break up the cement base and then hand dug though whole site (75m2 ish) to a depth of 20cm ish using a spade/shovel and wheelbarrowed the lot out to the road the be trucked away. God knows how many tonnes and God knows why I didnt just hire a mini digger, but it was certainly good exersize.
Here's the excavated sideway.
And here's the excavated patio area with some crude levelling aparatus.
I concreted down my edging and got rid of the old inspection chamber cover and replaced it with an inset jobby to keep my path continuous.
And the back excavated... I probably went a bit too deep in some places bearing in mind it's only a patio, but wanted to be safe rather than sorry. I used Marshalls tegula blocks for my edge course and used the tegula straight kerb for the step.
Because the land to the back of the house slopes towards the house, I had to either dig very deep at the grass edge of the patio and build a retaining wall for the grass in order to create a slope away from the house or to do what I ultimately did; I engineered a fall on the patio towards a 3 metre section of the house and installed an Aco channel drain and connected it to the existing gutter drains.
I then whackered down my type one at the side...
... and at the back. I bought this Bomag wacker off eBay. Superb piece of kit and reliable as you like. Will sell it back at some point and wouldnt imagine I'll lose a huge amount on it.
I ws a bit nervous regarding the whole screeding process so I decided to start from the path on the basis that it was an easy area to screed and to practise if I got levels wrong. I compacted my sharp sand and then used some notched planks as my screed board.
Continued in next post.....
Here's the project -
I don't really have any pics of the original patio, but you can see a bit of it here; the slabs weren't that bad, but they were laid badly on a very suspect base which in parts was no more than 1cm of brittle concrete on top of the soil.
I hired a breaker to break up the cement base and then hand dug though whole site (75m2 ish) to a depth of 20cm ish using a spade/shovel and wheelbarrowed the lot out to the road the be trucked away. God knows how many tonnes and God knows why I didnt just hire a mini digger, but it was certainly good exersize.
Here's the excavated sideway.
And here's the excavated patio area with some crude levelling aparatus.
I concreted down my edging and got rid of the old inspection chamber cover and replaced it with an inset jobby to keep my path continuous.
And the back excavated... I probably went a bit too deep in some places bearing in mind it's only a patio, but wanted to be safe rather than sorry. I used Marshalls tegula blocks for my edge course and used the tegula straight kerb for the step.
Because the land to the back of the house slopes towards the house, I had to either dig very deep at the grass edge of the patio and build a retaining wall for the grass in order to create a slope away from the house or to do what I ultimately did; I engineered a fall on the patio towards a 3 metre section of the house and installed an Aco channel drain and connected it to the existing gutter drains.
I then whackered down my type one at the side...
... and at the back. I bought this Bomag wacker off eBay. Superb piece of kit and reliable as you like. Will sell it back at some point and wouldnt imagine I'll lose a huge amount on it.
I ws a bit nervous regarding the whole screeding process so I decided to start from the path on the basis that it was an easy area to screed and to practise if I got levels wrong. I compacted my sharp sand and then used some notched planks as my screed board.
Continued in next post.....
