DIY Stone Pathway - Quikrete Walk Maker 2' X 2 '

hi everyone welcome j d gardens we're here in garden west today on an absolutely beautiful day and you know there's nothing that more satisfying for a gardener than to be able to walk through his garden and enjoy the fruits of his labor and nothing helps that more than having a nice paved walkway you know something to get you out of the dirt and definitely off the grass you know there are a lot of options for walkways crush stones stepping stones even wood but my favorite would have to be pavers pavers come in a variety of styles and colors and can be tailored to any size area or design most of the time people use them in high traffic areas like patios and driveways because of their durability but pavers don't always have to have a practical function they can be used just for their visual appeal they will make any garden or pathway look more attractive cleaner and tidier than grass or dirt ever would now pavers are a great option for walkways but for those who aren't familiar with them it can be a pretty big process getting them installed in order to install pavers correctly about eight inches of topsoil will need to be removed to create a base or foundation for your walkway three and a half to four inches of tamp gravel will need to be added and about 2 inches of stone dust for a smooth surface from there pavers are arranged in a desired pattern and then secured with edging and polymeric sand for the joints digging the pavers into the ground will allow for the walkway to be level with the surrounding garden so as you can see it's quite an involved process and depending on the size of your project it can get kind of costly but if that's really not in your budget i do have a way of making a great pathway that's a total diy project and it won't break the bank let's head over to garden east okay so we're here in garden east and as you can see we used a more traditional style walkway around our planter beds now at first glance you might think wow dan you got an individual stones here you got nine different styles this is crazy this would be like a giant jigsaw puzzle it'll do but actually it's poured concrete using a template system let me show you this is called the quikrete walkmaker and what it is is the template that you pour concrete into and let me line it up for you so you can see the template matches the style now this style is actually called uh country stone but there's a few different styles so you can see you can choose a style that's more to your liking if you don't like the more traditional look now it's a very simple system i'm gonna have uh jackie uh demonstrated in a minute but just to warn you there is some uh labor involved there's uh it can be a little time consuming depending on how much path you're doing and some a little bit of backbreaking work i mean each template you use an 80 pound bag of concrete so if you think about it today we're going to be doing around 32 bags uh so that's going to be about a little over 2 700 pounds and i'm gonna be lifting and moving around uh so there is some work to it but the results are great so uh and you can save yourself a ton of money give me an example like the pavers that i showed you before in garden west uh each one of these uh it's about nine by uh six by nine uh each of them about a dollar and you would need about uh eight of these to fill up this template and an 80 pound bag of concrete costs around uh a little under four dollars you could probably get it for so you can see the savings and that's just uh this just about a dollar just for the stone not including the crushed uh crushed gravel uh the stone dust and obviously the labor to do it if you don't know how to do it this is truly a diy project so uh uh we'll show you in a second so in the beginning of spring we actually redid garden east so there still is a fair amount that we have to do if you want to bring the camera around we have this whole back section that we're going to be doing today so before we get into that let me uh talk a bit about the prep work that you have to do now the beauty about this system it's it's what's called like a self-leveling system meaning once you place it on the ground let me get the right layout here once you place it on the ground because it's a sturdy it's a sturdy uh plastic form it stays perfectly level on the top so even though your ground might not be perfectly level the top will always stay level and as you pour the concrete it will fill in all the little gaps so it'll be nice and smooth and flat on the top but like i said there is some prep work you want to do first depending where you're doing it if you're doing it on grass you want to obviously pull up the grass that you're doing if you're doing it anywhere else you just want to try to get it as smooth as possible doesn't have to be perfect but you want to put a little time into it the more you put into it the better it's going to come out you want to get rid of any kind of weeds or any kind of growth that you have and what i like to do is i like to use a hole and i just scrape it down i've already done this so i'm going to show you i just like to scrape it down to get it as flat as possible if you have low spots you move all the dirt over there and you just get in you look at it with your eye and say yeah okay you know that's pretty level and that's good the template will take care of the rest now the other thing that i like to do before i get started i usually do this the day before but uh we have two sections so i already did that section so i'll do this section and i like to use some kind of ground clear in the area i want to make sure that any kind of growth is killed underneath it so what i like to use and there's different ones but this is what works well for me it's actually ortho weed uh weed clear lawn and weed killer and you can use a spray bottle i actually like to use a watering can because i like to be give it be very generous with it because i really don't want anything growing in between so what i do is i pour get close to plants and i really laid in thick and if you have to use a little more that's okay so there you go all right and now what i'm going to do now is i'm going to cover the whole area probably have to make another batch of this and then what we'll do is we'll set up everything that we're going to need to start the pathway okay so we're about ready to start mixing our concrete for our pathway a few things we got our bags of concrete here ready to go we got more in the driveway we got some fresh clean water and we've also added a tarp to protect the grass from any spillage now one way to mix your concrete is to get a trough like this uh you can get these at home depot or lowe's and uh can hold an 80 pound bag of concrete and it's pretty straightforward you add the bag of concrete add the water and use a hoe and you can mix it up get the consistency that you need and that's fine if you're doing a small amount but if you're doing a large amount like we are today you might want to consider getting a cement mixer now you can rent these uh i think it's every for four hours or for the day and uh it's a lifesaver if you're doing a ton of bags you you really might want to consider that one other thing you might want to consider is depending on how much you're doing and how much time you have and if you're whether you're doing it alone you might want to consider buying one now i know you said that sounds a little silly what am i going to do with the cement mixer but think about it to rent a cement mixer like this probably cost you close to 100 for the day okay so if you were doing like 30 40 bags or more you know it could run into the second day so you're going to be close to 200 a cement mixer like this costs about 300 and they actually make smaller ones so if you do the math you might want to consider that because the if you uh if you have it then you're not under the gun that you got to get it back to home depot via charge for the extra day you can work at your own pace and if you don't finish it over the weekend you can do a couple of bags every day that's the beauty of owning it and if you have a lot of other concrete work you're going to be doing in the future uh it's uh really uh something you know obviously if you have the space and if you want to spend the money on it i mean i've had this uh concrete mixer for about uh i think close to 15 years and it's great it's electric so i don't have to worry about anything it's not gas powered and it's been a trooper for me so uh just something to think about just kind of weigh out how much concrete work you might be doing in the future and whether you have the space to store it and at the end of the day if you have a large project it was still probably cheaper to buy it and then you can always try to sell it down the road if you don't have the room for it so just think about it now another thing is i'm gonna speak from personal experience here is uh if you're not used to working with concrete mix uh concrete mix you might wanna you wanna make sure that you're protected now of course we've uh one other word advice don't pick the hottest day of the year to do this you want to do it on a cooler day and start early because i think it's going to be hitting into the upper 90s then it's going to be terrible but it's important that i'm covered long sleeves and a and a long heavy shirt because uh with working with concrete there is something concrete burn or chemical burn and it's actually happened to me i think i have a picture of it so when you're working all day and you're mixing about 32 bags and you're going to be sweating and the water and everything's going to be getting where it's very easy to get burns on your arms and on your on your torso it and it's happened so with that being said let's uh get started make sure it's working okay perfect all right so uh jackie's over here in uh in garden east she's gonna be doing the forms i'm gonna mix it out here and i'm gonna transport it over to her so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna take my cart here i'm going to add whoop give it i'm going to add the trough inside so i can pour it right into there this actually pours right down and then i can transfer it a wheeler right over to her so i have a little scoop in there so before we do that let's uh let's get the bag of concrete is the fun part so always have a razor with you don't just rip it off from the top because then it's going to go over you want to control as much as possible so [Music] okay now i'm going to do one bag at a time [Applause] because i'm going to be transferring it over to jackie so hopefully you can hear me as the cement mix is going now if you read the instructions it says three and a half quarts now normally i just take a water hose and i've been doing it for so long and i just kind of know how much to do it but i'm gonna do it correct way for for you all so i have a court here i'm gonna fill it up here [Music] three and a half i find that you usually need more but i'm gonna do what it says for now and we'll start mixing and i'll make sure it gets mixed up well it's a lightsaber trust me okay so just want to make sure [Applause] now we actually want it to be a little more we want it to be a little more soupy because it's easier to work in the form so i can see that three and a half quarts is not going to cut it it's getting there right now four and a half and [Applause] this will probably do it five and a half you don't want it too soupy because you have to work it but it's getting there [Applause] i think we're good now the reason i was using a shovel because if you've ever worked with a cement mixer it's very much like eating um peanut butter sticks to the roof of your tongue and it does the same thing inside a cement mixer so okay okay so now i'll dump it right there and i usually turn it on to make sure it dumps everywhere everything that's inside rather okay and i think that's that's it yep gotta start off and i think it's a pretty good consistency i lost track is she the expert on this so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna wheel this over and she's going to show you how to work it into the form okay so dan got us our concrete mix and i have the form and we're going to press it up against the stones that we did before so it matches nicely it's against a piece of wood which makes it straight and what i like to do is as dan mentioned about the chemical burns what i like to do to protect myself is i wear latex gloves underneath my rubber work gloves still makes it flexible see can move it no problem it's a little hot especially on a hot day but you know what it's worth the protection okay all right so make sure it's pressed up against both sides make it straight and make it so it ends where you left off okay now i have a trowel really all you need is a trowel but what i like to do when i have big sections like this is i use my handy dandy scoop i always have a handy dandy scoop and this is what i use for concrete work so the consistency first of all check the consistency and make sure it's right this actually looks perfect it's not too dry and it's not too wet and this baby bear says it's perfect so you scoop up a large amount and i'm going to go for the biggest stone here kind of packing in a little bit with the scoop you'll use the trowel to get into the corners see it's a little bit there's a little bit of slurry there just scoop a little bit more and then make it nice and level now when you get that little bit that needs in that corner you take the trowel and you kind of just pack it in there and you pat it down as you go put a little bit more in that corner and just kind of focus on the corners that's the key thing at first you can always pack more on top and it is going to level out according to the ground that's what's the beauty of this template i need a little bit more and take a little bit more there and you can always go back so if say right now i'm okay with that i'm actually going to put a little bit more on there but i'm going to continue to show you the different stones so we're going to do this stone and you can continue doing it so you don't keep it as neat but you'll get a lot more done quicker right now that's kind of neat and you don't have to do that see like that just pack it in as best possible we're going to see how much we can fit in here i think we're going to get a little bit more than that 80 pound bag for one template but we're going to say don't chins on it if you need it take it there's another pretty big stone just keep packing it in like i said the corners are very very important and if you put too much in like this may have a little bit too much what you do is you take the trowel and you scoop it up and you put it in the next one now there may be dig marks in here but like i said what you do you just keep packing it down and it flattens it out and if you need just a little bit in the corner take your trowel pack it down and i think that stone is good if it's going to be a little stone like this take your trowel i think the scoop is going to be a little bit too big for that just keep packing it it's really all about packing it down i think that might be too much there we go okay for now i think that's good i think i'm going to come back to that a little bit later when i'm done with everything else let's pack this down get that in the corner pack it with the with the trowel that's the beauty of having this trowel with the pointed edge okay a little bit more in there and after a while you'll get the hang of it as to how much you're going to need per stone see there's a little bit too much in there so i'm going to pack it down just to make sure and i'm going to pack this down and you kind of have to work a little quick with this because the cement will dry and you certainly don't want that to happen okay so i think we're ready so we're gonna actually move this bucket take the form off place it next to it take the trowel and start patting down the sides to make sure that all the lines are removed okay now there's not going to be a lot of lines but if there are any lines you don't want them to show that it was an actual template you want to think that it's actually stones all right so i see that uh i actually have a little bit more than just this one template that i can use this for so the what i'm going to do is just place this next to it you could do a half turn if you want but we like to have a consistent path this is the design so we just place it right next to it and then i'm going to continue hey man it's coming out great yeah it is coming out pretty good yeah only 22 more to go ah you want to take a stab at this absolutely you want to mix those 80 pound bags of concrete no i think i'll stick with this last one huh yeah it's been a long day right babe i know but you know what it's worth it looks great yeah it does so we got to do now is we got to let the concrete cure so we're going to keep spraying it down or misting it with some water so it cures slowly for the next few days and we'll be back later and show you how to finish up [Music] okay so it's been about three days and the concrete is curing nicely and safe to walk on and all we have to do now is literally fill in the gaps but i want to talk to you a quick thing about color now if you're thinking about adding color to your pathway companies like quikrete make a dire solution that come in a variety of different colors now this solution is added while you're mixing the concrete but it's something that you might want to take into condition very early on when budgeting for your pathway each uh each bottle of the solution will run you about six dollars or so i think that's the going rate and each bottle will do about two bags of 80 pound concrete so let's use this as an example we did about 32 bags of concrete so half of that is 16 times 6. that's about 96 so you're about close to 100 actually will be more than 100 after taxes so you really want to factor that in early on it's not like a last minute thing or it's going to come out it's going to hit you in the wallet really bad now we actually didn't use a uh any kind of tent and the reason why as i said we've been doing this uh pathway for years we've actually done in different parts of our property and we've actually consolidated all here to uh to garden east and as you can see right here the difference this is an older pathway i think we did about i don't know seven years ago and um i'll tell you it was a nightmare it was a giant jigsaw puzzle putting it back together uh in in the pattern but as you can see this is the newer concrete so you see the white and the gray now what we're going to be doing in the future is they actually make a concrete stain which i've used and it's something you spray on and it's a permanent and it works great and we found that that would be a lot easier so we're going to try to match the two together so let's get back to filling in the gaps now there's a couple of different ways of doing it quickly makes a product that's a polymeric jointing sand say that three times real quick it's actually called hardscape and what it is it's a it's a sand that you sweep in between the cracks or the gaps and you hose it down with water and when it dries it'll act like a bonding agent and hold all the stones together and a lot of people like that because they don't have to worry about the the stones moving at all uh but for us uh we actually don't like that too much because it uh it there's too much gray in it it kind of looks like concrete and it doesn't give that natural stone path uh that we want uh so we actually use this regular topsoil and it's the same process it just takes a little longer let me explain since what you'll do is you'll want to sweep in between if you can see i'm doing it you'll sweep in between and since it's just regular dirt there's a lot of gaps underneath it so what we'll do is we'll hose it down with water and then let it dry and then sweep in some more eventually all the dirt will seep to the bottom and lock everything in place so it does take a little while something you can do to speed it up is that if you have your template you'll want to pack down the sand or the dirt rather so you line it up the way you want step on it and what it does it actually will start packing down the sand for you and still add the water it'll help lock it in but as you can see there see it's packing it down it takes a little while and then like i said you just keep adding more dirt it'll fill in the top and again when you see that you've packed it down it's getting there nice i've already done this a few times before we started filming but you see how that looks and then once you feel that you've gone and i'm not adding water right now because i don't want to make a muddy mess as we're filming but you see it'll actually help form the stones around so you really get the kind of the country stone look that you're after and like i said repeat it until you feel that everything's the look that you want and don't try this while everything's wet it'll just make a total mess try it one more so you get the look and you really see the stones are becoming pronounced they look great form's tough it can handle it just don't don't get too crazy with it just really will define each stone and give you there you go now i'm gonna add some more water to it i've already done some but i'm gonna add some more and do it a few more times but it'll really get the stones nice and tight together and it'll work very similar to that polymer sand now if you like the look of this it doesn't come without its problems and let me explain this is dirt in between so what does that mean it's very likely that you can get weeds so it can be a uh a little bit of an upkeep uh coming through and taking out any weed so the best thing uh that we suggest to do since we've been using this forever is every couple of weeks come around with a watering can and some kind of weed killer and just go through everything just spray everything down everything will go into the cracks we'll kill off any kind of growth in there because you do not want to go away and forget about this and come back to a bunch of weeds because everyone knows weeds grow like weeds and they are relentless so it's a little bit of upkeep but uh i think at the end of the day once you get it all and you fill in the gap i think that the look is really amazing and like i said it breaks it up than the normal uh uh pavers so i'm gonna continue finishing off the rest of it and we'll show you what it looks like when it's totally done so we're all done now and garden east has never looked better keep in mind that depending on the size of your project it can be a two-person job so we hope you enjoyed this video hope you found it informative hopefully it gives you the motivation to try something different in your garden and if it does please leave us a comment we'd love to hear from you and be sure to hit like and subscribe and tell a friend so from garden east we're reminding you until next time yes we can

Channel: J&D Gardens NJ

Views: 1,000,189

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Id: mQT7HeI-3hE

Length: 30min 50sec (1850 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021