How to level the ground for BASE PREP for Pavers! The Perfect Patio series Part 2: Base Prep #diy

okay part two of the perfect patio series today we're going to look at some bass prep really good bass prep is the key to a really nice flat clean paving stone surface that is going to last a long time any kind of minor discrepancies in the bass prep will show over time with a sand layer that might slowly settle out in some of those spots where the sand is thicker so really important for us to nail this spacecraft first i'm going to set up some stakes on the perimeter and kind of line them up with my slope and i'm using laser level to transfer some level lines all the way around and from there i can set up my strings and we can actually do a quick calculation on slope in a second as well so i always like to set up patios so that it's sloping in one direction if possible obviously sometimes you need to slope to a drain so there will be multiple slopes but in this case i tried to set it up so that the whole patio is sloping just one direction about 1.5 percent uh to the away from the house away from the building and that way the whole patio is going to feel really flat right so it's definitely going to still have slope to pull water but it's going to feel and look pretty flat when you're actually on it so for a furniture it's not going to rock or anything like that and because i'm having more of a natural shape along the dry rubber bed i can just set a state kind of farther away not in line with the other two so i'm just going to use level across so using the level parallel to the level lines and that gives me a good sort of translation over to the stake that's a little farther away so i'm just going to go over how i actually calculated that once again so looking at our direction of slope for the main patio i'm going to shoot my level lines onto the perimeter stakes so shooting that benchmark height on all of the stakes on all four corners and then i'm going to do a length calculation i usually just keep it in inches to make it simple it's 168 let's say times that by my percentage so 1.5 and then on the far perimeter lines so the direction that i'm sloping to the two on the right i can simply measure down that amount and make marks and set up my strings to those heights and that gives us a perfect percentage of slope on the surface i always like to double check when i tie my strings that nothing is overlapping awkwardly i think i loop this extra time around so just make sure that that's really really precise super important and that they're all really tight that's why i use my knot setup i'm sure you've seen in some previous videos now i can use the strings i'm not worrying about calculating heights or slopes anymore i can just simply measure down from the strings to get my finished height for my first couple layers of road base making sure that we're not adding more than about three or four inches at a time before we compact then we're going to work our way up and compact it to until we get to our finished height and then we're going to screen it for these first couple layers it's really important to actually wet the road base down uh it really helps sort of lubricate all the particles so it compacts really well always nice to keep the dust down as well if you're working in a really hot environment so really important to overlap i usually do about let's say three quarters to a half overlap on each pass and you have lots of time here right you're probably moving along pretty fast at this point the compaction definitely needs some time to actually work so we want to get as much force into the ground as possible that's really what we're trying to achieve you can think of it as like you're already settling the ground over time so the more passes you take sort of the more years of settling it's gonna impact into the ground so it's really helping create that really really rock hard surface that's going to last a long long time and there's a bunch of tests we can do to actually see if we reach the right compaction levels i find the best way to go for myself is to actually get up on the balls of my feet and press down and i can really feel and see if any of the gravel sort of displaces or moves under my feet and you can actually hear the compactor when it starts to get really hard it'll sort of bounce a little bit more than previously where the vibration was sort of getting soaked into the ground it'll bounce on the surface and start to sound a little bit different as well so once we get to the final layer of rope base i'm actually going to set up a screed board with the string lines and i'm just making a mark there taking into account that this final layer is only about two inches thick so it's only going to compact about half an inch or so and that will give me a good sense of where i need to put that line in relation to the thickness of the paper and the thickness of the sand on the surface that we're going to put on after so i'm just double checking and with screening road base this is sort of an extra step that a lot of companies have noticed don't necessarily do but i find that just a few extra minutes to do this really helps a lot in that final compaction layer to make it super flat so we're not sort of just making it up with different thicknesses of sand later any discrepancies we're actually getting this layer super flat first so kind of like mopping our way out if we're cleaning something we're gonna start from the far end so the farthest point away from our gravel pile and we're going to work back towards it just adding a little bit at a time and raking it around and then scraping it to that really precise height using my marks and the streamlines so taking your time moving sort of back and forth working one side and then the other and really just pulling that board across the surface trying not to dig in anywhere until the surface is really really flat and once again at this point the string lines are already set right so i'm not putting a level on this at any point i'm really just using the string lines and trusting my previous work and the heights to get it to the correct slope so now that the road based layer is screeded we're going to compact it really really well and get ready to move on to the next phase of the project so we're gonna rough in some material for the river rock details and we're gonna start to look at some screening in preparation for land papers see you in part three

Channel: Construction Kev!

Views: 213,446

Keywords:

Id: KWV91akfnHI

Length: 7min 6sec (426 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 21 2022