The Patio, Weekend 2

Well, the 6 tons of rock came during the week and Linda and I spread it 4" thick in the patio area. Of course, it has to be pretty level, and sloped evenly away from the house. We stuck stakes every 4 feet, leveled string, and filled as best we could. The next step was tamping. God how we love tamping!

John Zaczek and I went to Home Depot to rent their gas powered mega-tamper because it would make short work of the project. The only problem was, Home Depot wanted $98 for 3 hours rental. This just wouldn't do so, venturing into Home Depot we found a manual tamper. What is a manual tamper? A chunk of iron on a stick that costs $20. I bought two.

So, thefirst thing we did was tamp down the rock (yes, that's drainage rock with powdered rock in between).


Next, you cover the area in black landscape fabric and get ready to dump the sand (or in our case more powdered rock) 2" thick into the patio area. You need to lay 2" thick pipes down and "screed" the sand:


This makes sure everything is level:


Of course, after a little work I realized that I had bought 2" thick INNER DIAMETER pipe instead of 2" thick outer diameter pipe. This is a big (.5") no-no. So we started over, after a trip to Lowes to buy the right pipes. But after a while, we got in a groove.




Screeding done, we just need the patio pavers and... some way to get rid of the rest of this dirt!


-Ed