Installing a 15 x 30 Paver patio in 8 hours

[Music] this has been such a freaking nightmare this is gas it feels like an electric solid limestone the sketch factor on this bit right here is high so we got five lines gas and electrical running right through all the way through where this walkway and the patio is supposed to go and that's that's just not gonna happen now so back to the drawing board these are the ones that we know for sure the homeowner ran and if you look down it you can see it goes like this it's going like this and then just whoop so from probably about i think it was right about here on to where about that grass is is sitting on a huge limestone slab which is why i'm assuming that we didn't he didn't get this down any deeper because right now this is from here to probably about foot and a half from the grass it's like four inches down probably not even so right where sam is at is supposed to be an extension of the paver patio a sidewalk that runs off and goes around the way but there's going to be an issue by installing pavers because we can't get the proper amount of basin now we do have a couple of different options that we can use if we're going to continue with this project and the customer wants us to keep installing papers the first option will be to go ahead and start hammering out all of that rock that's going to require a change order our second option is going to be give the customer a different type of material that will still accomplish the goal of giving him access and make it look like a finished product but won't require quite amount of the same base material now in this case we give the customer the option of using natural stone because if natural stone shifts and moves that's not the bait it's not the end of the world because the natural stone automatically has different contours on the surface of it and when you don't have the natural stone physically connected to each other when one stone shifts and moves a little bit it's not quite so noticeable as if they were sitting next to each other and one stone gets off and creates a trip hazard by having the space between them we still accomplish the end goal of a finished landscape but without doing so much excavation and base prep we're doing kind of a stone walkway from where the corner of the patio is going to be down here kind of down around the corner there to the back door on the boat house cabin shacky deal so blaine's running and grabbing the rock we need right now i'm gonna finish getting this fabric down and he should be back right about when we're finishing up hopefully [Music] one of the questions that's come up in the past is if you if i recommend using a landscape fabric below a paver patio and if you have soft or questionable soils and then you're worried about soil mitigation which means the bad soils mixing with the good soils a soil separation fabric is a very cheap insurance policy [Music] if you're wondering if you should use it or not well let's just put it this way if in doubt roll it out it just works and it's a cheap insurance policy and will give you peace of mind the pavers we use on our projects are called willow creek paving stones we've used them for over 20 years without a single issue with that kind of track record we feel pretty comfortable delivering these out to a customer's site they've always delivered very consistent quality and color throughout we don't like to have surprises in our material when we bring it out and that's why we use these so around the sides of the patio where we're going to be going down to the beach front we don't want those stones to shift even though we're using natural stones and it does allow us and gives us a greater forgiveness and how we place them we still don't want them moving in four or five or ten years and so we put down a good solid recycled class five base the soil separation fabric then we lay the stones down then we bed them and then finally we top dress it with three-quarter clear rock of the customer's choice [Music] so brought back out on our nightmare patio i'm going to be excited when we're done with this one that's for sure uh so blaine's up grabbing some materials uh while he is doing that we're gonna grease the machines real quick and then i'm gonna start working on getting some more of our steppers in we stopped about here initially because we had a place a couple of big old rocks and we wanted to be able to get as close as we could with the skid steer so you know when ain't no way in hell we were lifting that big dog now this job would go a lot easier and a lot faster if we had access from the side where they were placing the rock and the stone steppers but that area is actually off limits because it's not the customer's property in fact the next door neighbors own directly up to the work zone where we're at and we've got to respect those property lines in fact we'll just let sam show you exactly what we're dealing with in just a moment [Music] [Music] yeah yeah i know shovelful's not the fastest way to do it but here's the thing these yards the property lines are just freaking silly because with the house we're working at it goes like this hey it's just a weird l and that house over there theirs is like this right so this is the property line right here and from the brief interaction i had with the uh with the neighbor kind of seems like the guy that wouldn't want people rolling over their rolling over the property line step one of installing our new paver patio is to remove all of the unacceptable unstable organic material that goes below the proposed paver area the next step is to rebuild the base that the paver patio will lay on in this case we're using recycled class 5 which is otherwise known as asphalt millings it consists of a three-quarter inch rock all the way down to dust and it packs up hard as concrete [Music] now we're only using 150 pound plate compactor which limits how thick a lifts we can put in so we put in micro thin lifts and keep compacting it all the way up [Music] next we lay out the screed pipes this controls how much sand we put in place this is one of those steps that sometimes guys get wrong and they use too much sand sand is a great building material but since it has no cohesive material in it it can shift and move so if you get point pressure on the corner of a block or a paver it has the ability to shift that paper out of alignment so we limit the depth of the sand between three quarters and one inch no more than that this is [Music] just in simplified terms we consider the course that goes around the outside of the patio the soldier course and everything that is inside the soldier course we call the field the soldier course can be a single layer of brick or a double layer of brick the soldier course can also have a different color than the field or it can blend in with the field we try to make sure that we give the customer different options and show them different pictures so what they end up with is what the vision they had in their mind now in this case we're going with a solid colored soldier course and a multi-colored random field [Music] once we get the sand down screeded and in place you'll notice that we never step on it in fact we're so cautious around that sand that we use what we call the click and drop method as we place the pavers and i'll show you what i'm talking about in just a moment [Music] all right you guys i promised you a demonstration and the importance of the click and drop method so this is how we put our pavers in we don't want to disturb pretend this is sand we don't want to disturb the sand base we bring the blocks in till they touch and drop and release click and drop click drop okay we don't drag them in we don't put them here and roll them into place what happens is when we do that as we're rolling the blocks watch right there you see that and if that's sand you're going to get that little bunching which is going to create spacing but look at now at this block i've also got a void space here so now i'm going to have this paver patio do it this not a lot just a little bit with the click and drop we hover the block above the material it's not touching anything and then boom drop and release that's the click and drop all right you guys so last week we got the rest of our pavers in got our patio built we did that sucker in a day which was awesome no cuts even better so plan for today is we're gonna start getting the steps placed along here well i just lost we're gonna end up setting these stairs side by each as tight as possible so to get a nice tight joint space we shave off the irregularities on the ends of the blocks but only on the unexposed sides with these steps they're rough on three sides and with how the homeowner wants them they want them doubled up and tight so there's gonna be two over there and three over there and that is not how these materials are designed to be used so we're trying to square them up the best that we can but there's going to be a gap so here's what it is so now this is where we go back to video one where we talked about setting the paver patio at the right height so that the step height onto the first stone equals the same height from the top of that first stone onto the deck on the other side of this project we have two stone stairs that have to match up to the top of that deck as well this is [Music] there you go the straps are used because we don't want to scar nick or mar these stone stairs these are not real natural stone stairs these are actually precast stone stairs so if we scar these it will be a difference in the consistency underneath the upper layer of the stone now if we were building a natural boulder wall or something else we wouldn't be quite as cautious because those scars tend to blend in because the stones are the same consistency all the way throughout but with precast material what you get underneath the upper coat is not always the same as what you see on the surface okay so had a interesting development out on our patio we're gonna snap a turtle laying eggs on the border look at that dinosaur looking thing [Music] heading back to the river this is just a gorgeous and amazing animal it's a common snapping turtle and actually a relatively small one it looks to have about a 16 to 18 inch carapace i've seen the shells on these things go larger than two feet across yeah interesting start to the day that snapper was up here laying eggs and gone mama snapper is back down to the watery depths of her home we are going to start pulling this away kind of from the side here and around the front so we're gonna start bringing in some black dirt and getting all that in oh well we were thinking maybe we were gonna move these eggs over here but this is a vet and she was talking to the exotic animal people at uh at her work and they were saying to leave them so we're gonna work around i'm gonna work around all those guys now if you recall in the first video this is the side where we came across the unknown buried utilities now unfortunately we couldn't bury those deep enough to get them allow to allow us to get a good base below a paper patio so we're gonna opt with the natural stone stepper on this side as well to finish off that landscaping [Music] one of the tricky elements when you're installing a natural stone sidewalk is the difference in the thickness of the stones themselves and the differences in the size you really want consistent thickness throughout because that will speed up the installation process now we use a local minnesota family-owned company called patio town to purchase our materials but natural stone like this is available from a large variety of sources the one thing that you need to make sure you look out for is to make sure that you get very consistent thickness in your stones that's the key to speeding up the installation process and makes it a lot easier to put these in when they're all the same thickness and you're not trying to dig each one down and level them all [Music] separately [Music] [Music] [Music] what we've gotten done today joey and i got the rest of the rock in here edging's in got our rocks placed this is all grated out except for the turtles egg nest uh we got this in yesterday it's all rocked this is all good to go we got our little barrier put in uh some next bit so we're gonna get this all kind of re-grated out just get a little bit of black dirt spread around [Music] so this area was our original work zone but it was also the original work zone for the company that constructed the fishing house down by the river and so we're finding that there's a lot of materials down there that are unsuitable to grow a new yard all of that has gotten stripped and removed in the first video and now we're going to be put importing black dirt re-grading this area out and prepping it for new seed our hydro bucket isn't available so we're doing it the old-fashioned way sprinkle the material out and then hand rake it out and then work your way out just like painting yourself out of a room [Music] your last day on site so all that we really have to do so we got some black dirt coming in and we're gonna get in this area now we're just picking some rocks and some other nasty stuff out of that area over there by the patio and we're gonna lay seat down and get our equipment out of here and that is going to be that let me tell you what all these little birds have been really liking this black dirt i've just been pulling bugs out of there and all that kind of stuff kind of cool now this is a great example of how we used to do it we've got to be very careful that we don't drive over the black dirt any more than we have to so blaine has to sprinkle this material out and then the guys have to come behind with the rakes and make sure that everything gets blended down and perfected heat plain can't go back and forth over this black dirt because that will compact it more than the rakes can fluff it back up [Music] all right so we're gonna start getting the seed down joey's freaking flying on it uh we got the rest of the little grass chunks and rocks and stuff up off the top of our black dirt here and then it's been my experience that when you're applying seed you need to double what they say per square foot to get it you know growing in and actually looking like grass and all that kind of stuff a lot of people might disagree about that seems there's always very strong opinions when it comes to anything about you know grass but that's just been our experience and that's how we're going to do it and that's how we will continue to do it because it's always worked pretty well for us um and then we're not using any of those broadcasters or nothing like that because we were born with two built-in broadcasters so we're just gonna throw it around from this point it will be the customer's responsibility to make sure that that new grass seed gets the right amount of moisture we want it to be wet but we don't want it to be mud moist not mud we also want to fortify the area where the street runoff could potentially overflow our rip-rap basin it's just a precautionary measure but we put down some quick grass turf establishment blanket to stabilize that area from potential a future erosion all right well that's that will be on to the next one and from what i have heard it's gonna be a beast it's gonna be a wall and uh all i know is we're making a dude a backyard and it's gonna be a nine foot wall and apparently it's gonna be a bear but we'll find out when we get there oh good they got the sprinklers on the seed sweet look at that all right so if you guys will recall we regraded all this from down on to the street uh we were gonna sod it but that was a little bit out of their price range so we did the seed and here's what we got so so so sam isn't actually kidding the next project that they're about to tackle is a bearcat it's a 9 foot retaining wall but it's not just a normal nine foot retaining wall we've got to reconstruct an entire backyard while we build the nine-foot retaining one because the backyard doesn't technically exist they've got a hill that goes down to nothing on the backside of their property and they want us to build a nine-foot retaining wall that stretches along the entire back of that property and then import structural fill soil so that we can level it out and give them a backyard now as we're building this project we have to do each of the sections in stages we've got to import the structural fill soil as we build the retaining wall a nine foot retaining wall is going to require between four and five layers of geo grid laid out horizontally between nine and 11 feet behind the face of the retaining wall the bottom layer of grid if this is the bottom will be at the one to two foot mark and it'll go between nine and eleven feet and then two feet above that so between the three and four foot mark will be a second layer then a third layer fourth and finally a fifth layer of geo grit we've got about 1100 to 1200 cubic yards of structural field soil that we have to import place and compact as we build the retaining wall so if you guys are interested in seeing how we do a little bit of a bigger project like this and then coordinate the structural elements along with the build let me know in the comments down below also i just want to say thanks to you guys i see you guys hitting that like button and i'll tell you that goes a long way and i see you guys commenting and just helping out and i really appreciate all of your efforts you guys so thank you for all of that i hope you enjoyed today's video if you found it helpful in any way shape or form let me know and then i'll just use that feedback to make more of these videos for you guys god bless and go get them you guys hopefully we'll catch you on another one

Channel: Stanley "Dirt Monkey" Genadek

Views: 135,215

Rating: 4.9668713 out of 5

Keywords: how to, paver patio installation, how to lay pavers, patio paver installation, pavers installation, paver patio, how to install pavers, how to build a patio, patio installation, how to install a patio, patio ideas, outdoor living, patio pavers, do it yourself patio, backyard patio, backyard patio ideas

Id: foa-KwKJ7Jw

Length: 28min 42sec (1722 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 16 2021