How To Pave - A DIY Paving Lesson with Jason Hodges

I love paving not for the fact that it's practical but the fact that it can actually pretty up your house and make it look a million bucks whether it's just Steph is down the side of your house a driveway a path or that entertaining area that you've always wanted pavers can do the job for you now I can show you how to layout and you can do your own little project at home first thing you're going to do is work out your little job I'm going to pave here I'm going to come across the house four meters and then out 3.62 mark it out and to set it out you'll need a string line some pegs a tape measure spray paint and a hammer now to start marking out I like to go to the most important corner first and this one here and of all four is the most important point I'm going to work off the house because it's relatively straight I'm still gonna use a string line there and go forward from there straight away looking at this concrete slab I can see that it's not ninety degrees to this wall so it's important that you only work off one face and do your maths from there [Music] [Applause] now I know I said four meters but I'm actually gonna mark 4.1 over here it gives you a bit of breathing space so it means you're Road base and you're saying you can go past your finished paving side and you can cut it away later on and hold it up [Music] say three point six becomes three point seven just with a couple of bricks cuz they're nice and heavy and not got to move I'm gonna mark it out it doesn't need to be super accurate because we're not actually laying any pavers there's pretty much just like joining the dots and remember that this is well wide of our finished paver and it's going to be mucked up with a spade in a couple of seconds anyway now I know the line that I've already marked down is parallel to the house because I've measured out three point seven here and three point seven at the other end and I've done a straight line with the string so how do I get the sides right well I'm actually using the side of the house I've come off a hundred mil and I found this point here and they look like they're running in the same direction now this is accurate enough for the excavation section because I've got that 100 mil to play with but it's not accurate enough for when it comes to laying the pavers a great little way to double-check that you're on the right path is to see if it's square now measuring from opposite corners what have we got five five zero zero and this is a good little tip putting a brick in each corner makes this a one-man job rather than have them get someone to give you a head five five zero zero wish me luck five five zero zero you know math was well worth it even though it took me three years once you've done your marking it it's on to excavate now you might be lucky and you don't need to take anything away for your finished heights of your paving job but here I'm gonna marry it into the concrete slab and of course I don't want to go too high up the side of the house and damage it so we need to go down and straight away I can see that we've got these here I'm guests and Telstra and power but I'm not an electrician and I don't know and either would you so how do you guarantee that you're not going to damage any of these or even hurt yourself it's called dial before you do the numbers double one double zero and these days they send your emails from all your suppliers whether it be your power you'll find your water or your gas they tell you roughly where they run on your property problem is this is an old joint and things might have been added to it since the day the place was built so it's a safety blanket but it's not a guarantee so when it comes to digging I'm very very careful because I want to see my next birthday what I'm doing a space like this rather than throwing a spade in and chopping into the soil I'd use my foot and feel as I go that way when I hit something I can stop the spade stopped at the moment I can investigate not just a little pebble I can keep going but that's a really good tip here's you can do this with confidence you know that both those things are in conduit is go down and feel for them nope all good where do you start excavating well I'm back to that corner that I started measuring off as well because I can work off the height of the slab now I know I need to go down a hundred and seventy milk from this for my finish height to be fast with that so you need to work out your finished height and work down from there forty or 30 70 comes appealing Road base 170 Miller going to go down if I get this right through here I can work that level all the way across my job so the excavation is done that's the hardest job in the whole thing the most physical now you might think why don't I just skip a little bit of the excavation and use less of the road base and sand well you could but your job won't last as long as if you do all the steps properly we're going to bring the road base in there spread it out about a hundred mil thick and then compact it with the whacker so what is road bass well commonly people make the mistake that it's just blue middle blue metals the big chunky stuff that you see like this which is great for the back of a retaining wall where you want to create drainage but trying to compact things that are all the same size well it's near impossible so if you look at this it's got big stuff little stuff stuff the size of a grain of sand which means when you compact it together there's a size particle to fill every hole and that's why it goes hard and flat well I've got my hundred mil of Road base in and I'm ready to go with the whacker but there's a couple of things you can do first to get a really good job what I'm using here is just a straight edge that's on a pole now don't expect every homeowner to have one of these and you shouldn't go and buy one or hire one because if it's just a little job you're doing around the house the back of your hard rake will do exactly the same job for you it just might take a second or two longer now if you look at this road base it's a bit dry and dusty so when I hit it with the whacker it might be a bit light and fluffy if I give it a light hose it can set even harder than just going over it with a whacker you don't want a too wet so the wacky goes swimming and gets sunk you just want a damp so that it can packs nice and hard [Music] [Music] now the next step is the sand and even the way you tip it out of the Barrow is important as you go forward the nose goes into your road base if I was just to pull that out I lift up all the road base and mix it into my sin so if I do it gently take it off the ground I barely disturb my footing as for the sand how do you get your Heights well this is where you need a little bit of patience a little bit of finesse and a little bit of skill I move the sand around by hand and push it towards the edges much there but no it's okay push that into the middle now how do I get my finished height of a paver perfectly flush with any existing height they are working in this case that existing concrete slab well I can't think of a better way than actually using one of your pavers I got a decent paper I broke it into four and I can use it around the job to get it right by running it along over the sand there's not enough in there there silly boy I can get exactly the right height there's a bit more in is you can see that my pavers flush with the concrete I haven't had to pick up a tape measure and put it down I can just run that across there and that's a perfect bed to start my paving what do you do where you don't have a surface like that well I've run a string line off the concrete and picked a height at the end of my job I've got fall of one and a hundred what does that mean well over a meter it falls one centimeter over ten meters it falls ten centimeters and if you look at that on a bubble they call it line four you can see here that the bubble is touching the line so I know that it's falling that way this little pad here is perfect if I continue moving the sand down picking those two pads they're up to touch the string line I'll have a nice flat level surface that falls perfectly around the corner and because we're not putting any drainage in here that's really important [Applause] remember I said the word finesse well this is when you need it you take your time slow down and get this sand on the one plane how do you do it well I showed you the pads I've done that all the way along two edges then I've put this screed in here and I've made a little Valley coming off the height that I had near the concrete if I check this and I've got line fall again I know that that is running perfectly level with this here falling one and a hundred I can continue that along there and get that line all the way to the end of my paving perfect and make a little channel now a pro paver would go straight over the top without digging into either of those channels and remove the excess sand for a beginner and I still like the door to speed is get some bar you can use tube or anything you've got lying around the house as long as it's relatively flat lay it over the top the negative with tube is you need to dig your trench for it and the positive with this is you can take it away and you don't have to fill anything in all I need to do now is tap them down drag my screed this is a professional one but if you don't have one you can use your level just be gentle with it or any piece of timber provided that it's dead straight it's your first time doing it I'd recommend kneepads they get very sore very quick now the fun stuff we get to actually pave what I'm doing first is setting up a string line so I can lay my first head of course now as a pro I'd run it off a string line every day of the week but a common mistake for di wires is the pavers start touching the street line as you start touching the string line you start pushing it out and you're paving gets a little bit crooked so a good little cheap way is to set up a brick now we're laying 400 mil pavers and I'm gonna allow a bit of room for those conduits down the other end so I've called for 60 off the house set the brick up here and in a couple of other places and then you can take away the string line and use your straight edge too but your pavers up to the straight edge isn't going to bend on you if you move it you're going to see it and you can push it back and you'll end up with a perfectly straight head of course so the string is gone and it's replaced with this hard edge now where my first pavers going to go hose through brick sitting in at the moment but what you can do how that mate don't you walk on the sand you stay there it's a spectator sport I can bring it on this side so now it definitely can't move back same goes here I can bring it this side and I can put my papers in as hard as I like because that's not going to move now when you're laying pavers you'd normally have to have a screwdriver or a tape measure and you need to try and get three mil gaps between all your pavers so that I put up to each other and rub overtime of chip one of the best things about these ed bright quadros because they've got lugs or nibs on the side so when you lay them they butt up but they're below the surface if they rub it doesn't matter but you end up with perfect gaps every time alderney first one's always the hardest and again I'm staying in this corner because it's the corner you're going to see the most when it comes to laying pavers I like to tap each one individually as I put them down sometimes I might use my foot but you end up leaving a mark sometimes they use my hand but that gets pretty sore quickly so a little mallet like this and a white one is perfect just to make sure that everything's sitting right the reason why it's white it doesn't scuff so there's less cleaning when you finish there's lots of little tips and tricks that can make the job easier for you just like stacking the pavers like this off-centered each one means when I come to get it I've got a nice handle on both sides and then again for the next one now I know this isn't my prettiest angle but I'm going to show you how to lay a paver you don't go like this and drop it in you put your fingers at the top of it you find the corner and you lay it down that way you don't disturb any of the sand and muck up your next paver now you can lay the head of course coming out this way one of the most important things you've got to get right is to make sure that you're exactly 90 degrees on this corner there's three ways I like to do it first one just lay a paver blind make sure the joints line up and the gap is even because of those lugs you've got your three mil straight away and it should be close to 90 degrees now to double-check grab a builder square they cost you about 10 15 bucks and check this corner if everything's touching all those lugs are touching then you're pretty sure that it's square but if you want to be the most accurate you should do a 3 4 5 triangle it sounds scarier than it is if I just use four pavers and three pavers that way I know that they're 400 each so the distance of 1600 milk that is my for my 1200 over there is my 3 so for this to be square it should be 2 meters I meant by about 5 mil I need to keep these out well that's the hard part of paving down I've got the head of going in two directions it's pretty much just fill in the blanks now and then we can finish the job off as you can see I've taken the planks away because from now on I can walk on the new pavers don't write on them and jump up and down because there's still a little bit loose but if you walk comfortably on them you'll keep your sand nice and clean now I'm laying the first of the inlay as you can see it's only half of one of these pavers because we're doing stretcher bond so it's quite a simple cut for the wet saw a brick saw but you start off with a half and then lay fool's for the rest of that line start off with a full and then lay falls for the rest of the line half full and so on it'll end up looking exactly like brickwork that you'd see on the side of a house it's nearly time to crack a cold one and celebrate on your new patio but not quite yet you need to fill the gaps with a sand now I'm using a gap set here which is nice and solid and I find it does suppress a few weeds long term but you can use a wash beach sand if you've got to order it you can just ask for sharp clean sand couple of bags should do a job like this and the drier the sand or the drier the paver the easier it is to move it around now don't be disappointed if you sweep it into every crack and you come out tomorrow morning and you see that it's fallen through and it's left some marks like this you keep a little bit to the side and keep topping it up for a couple of days you'll feel every joint and you won't have a paper wobbling ever pavers down they look magnificent except for the last head of course on this edge now I'm going to show you two different ways you can haunch the first one is you leave that last course out and throw some mud in there and tap them down and lay it on top and when I say mud it's obviously a sin and cement mix it's three parts of the same sand that I was paving on and one part cement that's pretty strong and I've made it pretty stiff you can see it's not running if it was soft and runny when I lay the paver it would just swim on me and by swim I mean move so go and underneath the paver like that keying it in and then doing an angle on the side of it is the strongest and best way to do it the quickest and easiest way to do it is to lay the paver then come along with the same mix and throw the mud up next to it and just try and push a little bit underneath of course and we got to tidy that up with a trout so you can go under and on the side or just on the side like this [Music] so as you can see it's sitting on about 150 ml of mud I clean up the edges aim for 45 degrees but it's gonna be coming by either a garden bed or lawn never gonna see it that's where you get the kids to write their names in it the second way you end up with a bigger porch because it's got to do more you don't have that bit underneath helping you anchor it in it it's still in 445 but you end up with a lot more mortar in the ground and if you're laying a lawn and you wanted to be fantastic unifying that your grass dries out a little bit more doing it this way because there's less soil for it I can't help myself I've been doing it for 20 odd years lucky last job we're gonna compact the pavers down embed them in place but if I use the plate compactor without this piece of carpet they're hard surface on hard surface I'd ended up breaking pavers so I've got a piece of carpet I've attached it to the front with a couple of tires on each side I'm going to protect my ears because I've only got one pair and fire this bad boy up for the very last time [Music] now because I use the pave lock it's important that I just give the whole job washed down when I finish get rid of any extra residue you don't want it and job done I've been paving for over 20 years and still when I see a finished job I get it you know here in the back of my neck standing up thinking what a great little project that was and I'm sure if you're tackling it for the first time we'll do something at home it's an even better sensation you

Channel: Adbri Masonry

Views: 683,231

Keywords: DIY Paving, laying pavers, how to lay pavers, how to pave, landscaping, diy landscaping, Jason Hodges

Id: 7QZ6PR3hcqA

Length: 23min 16sec (1396 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2019