How to Install a Brick Paver Patio

We showed you the changes we made to the exterior of this house here. Now we are going to show you how we installed a brick paver patio. The previous owners took their patio with them when they were foreclosed on. Then the weeds grew and grew!
We knew to sell the house we were going to have to clean up this mess. We decided to put another brick paver patio in.




After clearing out the weeds, we added a cement stoop.



We then leveled out the ground here we are doing some of the final grading. We needed to make sure the ground was going to be low enough to allow for four inches of gravel or limestone (we used limestone), one inch of sand or crushed limestone and the thickness of the brick. The strings here are our guides. They have been leveled and slightly tapered away from the house for drainage purposes. I think we dropped it 1/8 of an inch for every foot.



With this patio we were able to have the gravel dumped right on the spot. (The ground was dry and hard.) The patio we did for our house we had to wheel barrel 11 tons of gravel, which is 22,000 pounds. (That was crazy hard!)

 

Then we had to distribute the limestone, …



…and use a tamper, which we rented from a local rental company.   The tamper compacts the stone to get a nice hard level surface.

Here is the limestone all compacted.



Here the bricks were being delivered.



It was great to have them placed right by the patio.

 

I didn’t take pictures of the bricks being put on the stoop, but we used a glue that is made for landscape bricks. It comes in a tube like caulk.



Then we used  crushed limestone which we had delivered in another spot. We used this in place of sand, it is suppose to be better than sand. We used 1” conduit and a long 2x4 to gently level the crushed limestone.

   

Hubby  used our miter saw, with a diamond blade to cut the bricks.  Most people use a wet saw to eliminate some of the dust.
      

Our four oldest sons helped us in the laying of the bricks.  
    

We started laying the bricks! Yea! We are using a row of bricks for the edge along with black edging made for brick patios held in with 12” stakes.



Our sons helped carry and lay the bricks.

 

Here you could see how the limestone is being leveled with the 2x4 along 1” conduit, which has been leveled and slightly graded away from the house, allowing enough room for the bricks below our leveled lines. We did one section at a time.



The pattern we used is called running bond.



Here we are nearing the end!!!



The last brick laid in place. (Only the patio, now we have the walkway to do.)

Sand needs to be swept in to all the cracks of the bricks to help them from shifting.


Here is our little helper, sweeping the sand.

  

We used a border and the running bond pattern on the walkway also.



There are not many cuts needed in this style of a walkway. This saves a lot of time!



Almost done!

Here I am sweeping off the bricks.
Then we had everyone help spread the dirt,  grade it, and plant landscaping around the patio and walkway.

Here is the patio done.

   See the hose in the below picture, we use this to shape our area we wanted to mulch.        Here is the before!
Here are some more after pictures taken several months later in the early spring. We put a row of sod around the patio and then seeded the rest of the dirt area.

Putting in the patio our self saved us thousands of dollars, but it sure was an enormous amount of work.

How do you think it turned out?

Leave a comment and let us know. We love getting them!!!
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