How To Build A Custom Paver Patio and Fire-Pit!

[Music] here in a new project it's just a patio with a fire pit in the middle it's gonna have soldier and sailor course it's going to be square with that fence come to this corner just like this very simple should take us two to three days probably hello everyone and welcome to another video so today we're going to be building another patio with a custom soldier and sailor course as well as a fire pit in the center obviously we are professionals with the right equipment for this job but if you're doing it by yourself there's other ways to do it or places that you can rent tools that you would need to do the same thing so i'm going to do my best to explain this in a way that's understandable for the everyday homeowner first thing you want to do is decide the size of your patio in this case our client chose to go for 16 feet long by 12 feet wide so we marked it out with an additional six inches on each side to account for extra bass [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] we stripped the sod and began excavation if you're doing this without an excavator or skid steer you can rent a sod stripper at your local hardware store to strip the top layer of grass before excavating after the grass was stripped we began excavating until we reached a solid subgrade in this case the layer was clay a patio must have a minimum of six inches of crushed compacted gravel to create a solid base and withstand the freeze thaw cycles that winter brings believe it or not you could do this with a pickaxe shovel and wheelbarrow if you had the willpower so in that last clip you could see that the pavers were getting delivered so you can get them delivered from your local supplier you just need to calculate the square footage that you need and usually an expert at the store will know exactly how many of each type of brick you need so we went down nine inches to account for six inches of gravel one inch of bedding rock and two inches of pavers right now we're just after we compacted the subgrade we're just adding layers of gravel two to three inches at a time and compacting each one [Music] so it's really important to make sure that each level of gravel is compacted well so once again you could go to your local hardware store and rent a plate compactor like we have in this obviously we own ours but yeah you can get the same caliber machine at a home depot that's local to you and we hand tap all the corners [Music] one thing that's really important for patios is to have a slight slope on it so that water doesn't pool anywhere and it all goes off the edge if it rains for example so what we generally do is we do one inch of slope over eight feet so i think this patio was since it was 16 feet long we did three inches of slope to kind of accommodate the the yards grade a little bit but we also adjusted the grade around it to kind of make sure that everything in the yard flowed into it nicely so right here we're just it's called screening we set the rails which are 10 feet long at about 1.25 inches of slope each and we pulled a bar across them to a screed board across them to make sure it was perfectly flat then we watered it and compacted and you can see it it ended up really nice and flat so the next day we were back after we got rained out and we're screening the next layer some people use sand but we like to use seven millimeter wash rock as we find the pavers sit much nicer on it than just regular bedding sand so right here you can see an up close of the screening taking place so the rails are set at the same thing three inches of slope over the total length of the patio and we run a magnesium screed board over the the three quarter inch pipes there and it makes the grade nice and perfect so when the papers sit on it they'll all butt up to each other at the same height and nice and uh flush to each other this is the most complicated it's going to get on the project so i would recommend getting a laser line site to check your grades or you could just run an eight foot two by four level and measure one inch down on the far end to account for the slope here we are filling in the screed rail holes with a trowel and seven mil so now it's time to lay our pavers what we did is we did a square string line with the far end of the fence and we took off four inches to account for the sailor course and 8 inches to account for the soldier course that way we could just lay the interior of the patio and then cut the edges to and leave room for the soldier course in the sailor course so there's patterns you can get online for the brick type that you choose these are commonly called roman style papers so there's four sizes and they kind of go in a four block pattern through the whole thing on the left there we snap the chalk line for the straight edge and i just i cut it and we'll do that on each edge that we can begin laying the sailor cores [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's important to make sure all the pavers are sitting at the same height so when you lay them some might be higher than other ones due to inconsistencies in the screen so you can just simply get a mallet and tap them down as you can see in some parts we're doing that another important thing is on the sailor course we cut 45s in the in the darker bricks so that they are flush up to each other and for the fire pit section we actually lay out the fire pit first with the soldier course around it we mark it with a grinder and then what i like to do is cut as deep as i can with the grinder and then go with the chisel chisel out the the remaining parts and then touch it up with a masonry disk so that all the edges are smooth we've just found that this is the most success we can get grinders aren't expensive but you can also rent these at a hardware store same thing with the concrete saw that we were using to cut all the edges although you could also cut those with a four inch or four and a half inch grinder so after we got the patio cleaned up there we could finish laying the soldier course for the fire pit and then laying the fire pit itself so i just went along there with a level and a mallet and made sure each block was level and i laid the first course then the second one and then on the very last one i glued the cap the caps on then we got a nice decorative rock to put in the bottom so you don't have to just look at gravel and having it go into the patio allows water to drain away another thing is we use these plastic edges on all edges of the patio you can get those at your local landscape supply store as well as the fire pit kit and the adhesive that you need and we recommend putting in 10 inch nails every foot or so on each of the edges just to retain the patio bricks and make sure that it's anchored well into the base so we're just fixing any inconsistencies in the brick right now and right now we're going to sweep in the polymeric sand which when watered actually adheres like a glue and makes all the bricks tight together [Music] so after we had the sand spread through all the joints and all the edges we ran over it with a plate compactor and a plastic pad on the bottom to get all of the sand pushed in between the joints next what you have to do is water the joints you do three three watering patterns so the first one is light the second one is kind of a medium amount and the last one is a pretty heavy watering to get the water right down in between the joints to the bottom layer of sand and usually it needs about 30 minutes to start setting up and we just recommend that people don't go onto the patio 24 hours after the sand has had time to set up right now we're just touching up any low spots adding sod and overseeding so this is what we were left with hopefully this guide was straightforward for anybody watching and if you have any questions you can just leave them down in the comments and we'll try and respond i'll just put a few clips of what the finished product looked like here at the end [Music] you

Channel: Rocky View Yards Landscaping

Views: 22,654

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Id: bw51Z4Ntr-k

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021