Paver Patio Part 3 -- Equals 3 trips to Lowes...

DH took a vacation day today so we could do the patio.  We had a good start off, with some homemade breakfast burritos to fuel our labors.  We began with setting some sand on the concrete slab, and setting our first course of pavers.  We used the conduit (1" EMT, 10' long) as our scree-guide for the sand.  Ahh...this is easy we thought.

Wrong.

Turns out there were some problems with our calculations on how much paver base we would need.  DH initially wanted only 20 bags.  I persuaded him to double that, and we had 40 bags of base delivered with all the pavers.  The Lowes information said that one bag = 2 cubic feet of base.  They lied.  Those bags of 40# base have maybe 1 cubic foot of materiel, maybe a wee bit more, but 2 cubic?  No way!

This is what about 60 bags fills.

I had to make not one, not two, but three trips back to Lowes for a total of 60 additional bags (100 bags total so far).  Ouch, that was not in the patio budget.  My poor van whimpered with every 20-bag load.  That was 2400# of base I hauled in the van today.  There's probably half a bag of gravel loose in the van I will have to vacuum out this weekend too.

But we kept on working, all day long.  Gradually things began to take shape.  Here's the first course, going down.

First run of pavers.

Which then progressed to covering most of the original patio slab.  There were a lot of reworkings/miscalculations/corrections that we encountered, especially in dealing with the edge pavers.  We will still need a load worth of dirt hauled in, to back fill around the outside edge to hold the edge pieces in place, and to secure the anchor strips.  I think we called it a day around 5pm.  There are several more hours left to work on the project tomorrow.  But I think we have enough base, and sand to finish the job without any more trips to Lowes (other than for dirt!).

It's starting to look good.

Tomorrow we will finish laying the pavers and edge pieces, nail in the retention strips, and then lock it all up with the polymeric sand by brooming it in, sort of like this.

Then we will have our inaugural barbecue on the new patio tomorrow evening!  There will be bratwurst, sausage, hot dogs, and a variety of tasty beverages.  And of course, our regular Saturday guest, Mr. B.