How to Install an Urban Bluestone Patio | Ask This Old House

joe you look like a man in need of a patio well roger i got the hard part done now i need your help you sure did you dug it down just to the right depth take a look over here what i'm finding right here is subsoil that's that tan material that's where we want to be to start the patio here we have almost 12 inches of topsoil now if we put the patio on top of that in the winter time it'll absorb water freeze and move the patio up and down before long you wouldn't have a very good patio but because you dug down to the subsoil we're all set to start building up what we're going to use for the patio is this blue stone this comes from pennsylvania it's called natural cleft because it's split out and it has these little ridges in it after they split it out they take and put it on a sar and they cut it into dimensional pieces this is an 18 by 24 you can get a 20 by 30 2x3 everything in six inch increments and you can make a great pattern with that that's really nice and more importantly my wife will love it great but one of the reasons i did call you were these pipes i found in my yard this is why you always call a utility locating service before you dig who would ever expected to find these in your backyard what they told us are these are low voltage communication cables so we want to take and make these safe and that's the first thing we're going to do let's do it joe what we're going to do is encase this pipe in sand sand is like a universal warning sign anytime you're digging in your hip sand you stop because you know that something's buried underneath there after we put the sand down we're going to put in some base material and build up and then we'll add a little more sand on top of this just to make sure it's good and protected i want you to tamp that sand down and compact it because it's going to be under the patio and i don't want to have the patio settle where the sand is you don't have to kill it just pack it lightly all the way around the pipe this is what we're going to use for the base of our patio this is called pack or graded base and you can see it's made up of three-quarter inch stone and stone dust mixed together now that drains pretty well but more so it packs hot as a rock so i'm going to take and dump this out you're gonna spread about a three inch depth level and then we're gonna compact that all right you ready ready go to it heads up joe there you go coming back more make sure the base gets completely compacted i'm using a gas-powered plate compactor all right joe you ready to give it a shot sure am okay this is the accelerator right here you're just gonna pull this lever and it'll start compacting now i went parallel to the house what i want you to do is do the short perpendicular links now okay put your hearing protection on you all set to go yep i'm only putting down three or four inches at a time it's called a lift because that's all i can compact with that machine if i brought in six inches it wouldn't be completely compact and the patio would settle so we're gonna do it three or four inches of time until we build it up to just the right height joe we have our communication lines covered with six to eight inches of sand just as an added layer of insurance we're gonna put down this caution buried electric line okay we're gonna set it on top of the sand and then bury it with pack so if you hold that in down there i'm gonna run down the other end this way a hundred years from now if someone's digging up your patio they won't hit those lines put some pack right on top of that please patio is really looking good joe and it's nice and solid now we're ready to establish our grades for our bluestone looks good now to do that i looked at your house and i noticed that you have six inch risers coming out of the house so when you build a set of stairs here i'd like to keep the risers the same six inches all the way down so if we do that we need a multiple of six so we're gonna go down 30. that's five rises at six and that's looking good that's top of blue stone right there that's gonna give us two inches underneath that wood and that's great to keep it from rotting this line is a grade right here so that shows you what we're going to be laying on and where the blue stone is going to be but the first thing i did is i wanted the blue stone to line up with this edge of the deck so we have a beautiful line going out that way okay so we pulled the string line down and we brought it out here and we attached it at grade that's going to be the grade of the blue stone right there then i pulled the line 24 inches off of the deck now this is going to be our first piece of blue stones it's going to sit right in there but what i need to do is make sure that this line and this line are at a 90 degree angle okay so to do that i'm going to use a 3 4 5 method first we're going to measure out and hold that at the intersection of the lines we're going to measure out three feet and on your side we're going to measure out four feet all right and then if you go across to that mark i made yup it should be five thus the three four five rule perfect perfect now we're all set to go except that footing is sticking out to where we want to put the blue stone i'm going to give you a little rotary hammer to chip that off okay i'll get on it all right joe this is our setting bed for the blue stone this is nine part stone dust and one pot portland cement we mix it together with water now it's not going to be a cement base for the stone but it is going to conform to the bottom of it if you look here see all these nooks and crannies and bumps and holes if you tried to set that in pack or stone dust it would end up wiggling on you and it wouldn't be a good set because it's wet it's going to fill in all these holes so what i want you to do is just lay in a big lather of it right in here we'll level it off and then set the stone i'll tell you when keep her coming i'm just going to take and level it off a little bit okay put the piece in now i'm a little bit high which is what i want to be i'm going to take the rubber hammer see how that hitting it like this that's filling in all those holes underneath now the piece is in solid i can see where it's actually pushing the material out on this side so that means all those voids are filled underneath here the important part is right here i want to carry that quarter inch line to make sure we're true to this line and the whole patio is going to be nice and straight when we're done okay nice and easy there we go okay now a couple things we're going to do i put these black ones in to just hold this first piece in place but i'm also going to put these shims in these are half inch shims and that's the gap i want to have between each stone so what i'll do now is i'll just take and push that stone down to me a little bit now we just got to get it down to the line see how it's starting to mush out the bottom yep that tells me that it's packing underneath the stone now that really feels solid that feels like it's set really nice what i want you to do is push it down towards me a little more see how these shims are working now yep what you're going to have to do is take one of these metal stakes and tap it in right there to hold it in place go ahead okay all right now i want to keep true to this line so just take and put that one right in there for me good i think we're ready for the next one another two by three we're ready to start the second row we've laid out another line 24 inches from the first line now what's happening here is this line is dropping it actually drops an inch and a half so the water will run off the patio so this line is now lower than that line what we're going to do is fill this in and we're going to put in a two by three piece we started off with an 18 by 24. this is going to break that bond so it just spans every other piece so you ready ready raja looks great i love it i can't believe we finished it in one day hold on there big guy we're not quite done yet we have to fill in all the joints in this patio and this is we're going to use polymeric sand now i cut a little hole in it the trick to using this is to get it in the joint and not all over the blue stone so we're just going to go around and fill the joints up grab a bag and go ahead once this sand hardens up it'll stop weeds and ants from getting in here and it'll lock these stones together take the broom try to work it in the joints okay if you need some more you can steal it from some place that has too much but make sure that all the joints are filled right to the top one thing about the sand it's really important to get it off the surface of the blue stone we don't want it sticking to that when we water it in now this is going to activate that polymer sand and it's going to harden in the joints and lock everything together we have to wait five minutes and then water it again and then we're done okay looks nice anjo sure does what a difference with those joints filled in like grout yeah exactly well joe you wanted a patio you got a patio it looks better than anything i could ever imagine roger

Channel: This Old House

Views: 775,771

Keywords: This Old House, Ask This Old House, DIY, Home Improvement, DIY Ideas, Renovation, Renovation Ideas, How To Fix, How To Install, How To Build, Patio, Repair, Design, Do It Yourself, Bluestone, backyard, Installation, Landscape, Landscape Architecture, outdoor room, Home Repair, roger cook, urban patio garden, urban patio ideas, how to install an urban bluestone patio

Id: GIwtGWxF-IM

Length: 12min 7sec (727 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2015