A Bigger Patio

My dad came down this weekend to help me work on enlarging my outdoor patio. Since I've lived in this house, I've wanted a bigger patio. The current slab poured was 10' x 10'. As soon as Vince & I put a grill & patio table with chairs on it, you couldn't even walk on the patio. There was no room to grill without moving the chairs around and I had no room for a lounge chair to lay out & read. Dad offered this summer to come down & help me get it enlarged once the weather got cooler. And apparantly, the cold weather has arrived.

The above picture is before we started working.

Dad arrived Thursday around 4:45pm and I got home right about the same time. He started working on it right away & got all the grass dug up for the new patio area before it got dark & before Vince got home from work. When Vince got home from work, we all decided to eat at Shogun's Japanese Restaurant. I haven't been there in forever. It was really good food.

On Friday morning, Vince headed off to work. I took a vacation day from work & helped dad with the patio. Our first order of business, however, was breakfast. I took him to the
Skillet downtown Spartanburg. I had blueberry pancakes that were probably the best ones I have ever had. They were really good pancakes. We stopped at Home Depot to see what kind of patio stones they had. I didn't find any that I really liked so we headed over to Lowe's. I found some grey stones that had a unique pattern in them. We calculated that we would need 42 stone tiles. These tiles are about 40 pounds a piece (we weighed them on the scale). There is no way I wanted to put 1680 pounds in my car, so we decided to take 2 trips.

Once we got the tiles home, we loaded them in my wheelbarrow and carried them to the backyard. Each wheelbarrow trip was about 280 pounds worth of stone tiles. We went back to Lowe's for the 2nd trip & decided to get the 300 pounds of sand on a third trip. For a small space, the weight of all these items sure does add up.

Since the 10' x 8' patch of land had been cleared the night before, I laid out black paper that is supposed to prevent weeds and grass from growing through. We then covered it with a thin layer of sand.

We used this large broom to help level out the sand. It was a very handy broom.

Each tile was laid (sometimes 2 or 3 times each). We would walk on the tile & make sure it didn't wobble. If it did wobble, we had to pick it back up & level the sand again. This was a slow going process. Since each tile was 40 pounds, dad laid every one of them. I was in charge of the sand leveling.

After all the tiles were laid, we used two bags of sand to brush it in between all the cracks. It really made the patio pop when we did this final step. You can tell it's not the most level thing ever, but I'm really proud at how great it turned out. It looked really great....except it needed a few more things.

Dad & I hopped in the Rav4 one more time & went to Carolina Garden World. We found 3 juniper bushes to provide a privacy screen. You can barely see one corner of the new patio from the street, but I wanted it to be more private. It will take a couple of years, but these juniper trees should grow up and fill in nicely to provide a natural privacy screen. We also got 3 small gardenia bushes for the front part of the patio. We were 8" short in being the same length as the current patio so I thought that adding some plants would help fill in that gap & make the edges look clean & finished.

As the sun started going down, it started getting a lot colder & I had to put my coat on when we finished planting the bushes.

I think it turned out great! It made the whole patio area look so much bigger. The only thing left to do is add a bit of mulch around the new bushes. I left a little bit of space between the bushes so I could add some annuals during different seasons. I can't believe we finished this whole space in one day. When Vince got home from work, we celebrated by going to Wade's for dinner.