Pavers and flagstones are two of the easiest hardscapes to work with even for beginners.
So let’s talk pavers first. Now, traditional brick fall into pavers as well but this is what you call cast concrete pavers. These are all designed with molds and they’re made out of concrete. This one is sort of a miniature brick, this paver is actually designed to look like an old world cobble stone. And then we have what we call the interlocking pavers and these are cool shapes that are designed to interlock with each other.
These other two pavers that we have is something that’s becoming more and more popular. If you were to designed a large patio, you can use all of these, what it does is it gives you the look of these small cobble pieces, but actually instead of you have to lay every individual little piece there, you’ve got some nice sized pieces to work with. Now, this has got all the features. I mean, we’ve got different colors and tones, we’ve got that little angulated feel or look. It also got the cracks in there and piece is actually designed to look like flagstone.
Now when it comes to flagstone, it’s kind of a different ball game but they’re still simple to work with. This is about an inch thick and walk on graded anywhere between three quarters of an inch maybe up to an inch and a half. If it’s thicker than that, it’s considered patio grade and that you can designed an entire patio out of and you could put heavier things like furniture or stuff like that outdoors. So I’m going to show you how to lay flagstone, they both basically get dealt with the same and I’ll go over some of their differences.
The first thing I had to do and I’ve already got it done here is I excavated the area. My pathway was going to be about three feet wide. You will always want to excavate at least six inches beyond that on either side. So if you want to put in a three-foot walkway, let’s excavate a total of four feet just so that you have some room to work with this material.
Make sure the surface is level and start laying out your pattern. So I’ve got all my pieces laid out, now it’s time to install my pieces. What I need to do is create that foundation. So I’m going to leave my stones in place and I’m going to work one stone at a time, remove that stone, put down my base material and then reset the stone. And for base material, we have a few options.
Sand makes a nice base but you don’t want to get it over an inch thick. If you have to actually build you’re level up higher than that in order to get stone at the right height, then you’re got to want to use a crushed stone. They call it DG for Decompose Granite, it’s a crushed stone, it’s a quarter inch down to dust and it really packs together to give you a nice base.
You don’t want to pat this stuff down. You need this to be a nice fluffy base because were going to be working this base. And what I mean by working it is we’re going to take our stone and we’re going to shift it and put it into place where we want it. Gentle sliding back and fort maybe different directions to set it into place. Fill in or remove the base material until the paver is stable and leveled.
Once you get it done, you’re going to test it. Yeah, that’s much better. Then, you got to decide what’s going to happened in between these. There’s a few options, you can take crushed rock, this DG here, and you can put it in between each of your stones. One of my favorite is to actually grow ground cover between them. Now if your doing pavers, it’s a very similar installation except for the fact that you’ll do everything one step at a time.
You’ll excavate the entire area, you put down you’re entire base, you’ll lay down all you’re pavers and then top dress that with sand and vibraplate it all over the place. Either option, you have easy to install hardscape area in your new landscape.
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