During the fall, we dug up the existing brick patio at our house in order to level it with the adjacent concrete walkway and create more space in the garden bed at the top of the stairs.
The resultant patio, while not huge, will be a nice place to yell at the
SEPTA buses as they careen past our house with no regard for human life. We're looking forward to trying it out soon.
We rebuilt the patio on a base of compacted top soil, 2 inches of gravel, 2 inches of paver base, and 1 inch of sand. If you're interested in the process,
this article from This Old House covers the basics. The process of carting all that home in our Hyundai Elantra named Brewster is probably what put the poor fella into an early grave. RIP.
We used the dry lay method, which trust me, is much more pleasant than it sounds... I would add one thing to the article... per my cousin's suggestion, we added 1 part dry portland cement to every 3 parts of sand for both the base layer of sand and the final sweep layer into the cracks of the pavers. After a few winter snows/rains/thaws, the moisture slowly seeped into the sand and really locked everything into place. Its not as tight as a mortar bed would have been, but wowzer, is it a lot less work.
Surprisingly, even with all the upheaval of brick and sitting in a pile in the sun for a month or two, the moss appears to have survived the winter on the bricks and should splotchily cover the patio soon. At which point we can invite the
local hobbits over for elevensies.
As a result of reducing the overall size, we now have about 120 bricks left. I tried to
pawn them off donate them to my good friend Jim for his brick patio project, but apparently he didn't want to cart this insignificant amount down to North Philly. Anyways, now we have to come up with something to do with them.
My plan is to reduce the amount of "mowing" that I do with our manual spinny wheel mower thing that has the dullest blades known to mankind. I seriously think I could cut the grass faster with
my hammer. The only strip of grass out front is between the sidewalk and the road. I think I'll lay a series of brick "paths" across the short distance and then infill the remaining green areas with a walkable garden. More on that project later...
